the Finnish government has now acknowledged Karelian as a minority language in Finland. This means a position comparable with, for instance, Romani, Tatar and the Finnish Sign Language: the European convention on regional and minority languages will be applied to Karelian in Finland as well. In practice, this means that projects for the revitalization of Karelian in Finland can apply for state funding.
It has been estimated that there are roughly 5000 Karelian speakers in Finland, practically all of them bi- or multilingual. However, Karelian has never before been officially recognized as a separate language, and the post-war evacuee and refugee generations of Karelian speakers in Finland were subject to linguistic discrimination and forceful assimilation policies, for instance, in the school system. This year, a new professor's post for Karelian has come into being at the University of Joensuu, and in Nurmes, the first Karelian-language daycare home has been opened.