Criteria For Inclusion
These are the criteria established by the Minority Language Committee, influenced by the directives from the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 1997.
To be accorded official minority status, a language must have been spoken in Sweden for a significant amount of time. A precise figure has not been revealed, but qualified estimations consider 100 years to be reasonable, based on the included and excluded languages. A significant immigration to Sweden did not start until after World War I, and many languages currently spoken by a large number of people in Sweden are excluded, among them Arabic and Persian.
It is also required that the language be spoken by a significant number of people and be centred in a specific geographical region (the latter, however, not applied for Romani and Yiddish).
Furthermore, it is a condition that the granting of official minority language status should be of cultural benefit to the group speaking it. It is allegedly for this reason that Swedish Sign Language was not included – even though it is a unique language with a history dating back to the 18th century, it was considered to have a sufficiently stable basis already in Swedish culture.
Common culture is yet another criterion for inclusion. A further reason for not granting minority language status to the sign language was that its users do not share a unique cultural heritage since hearing-impaired people come from all backgrounds.
Read more about this topic: Minority Languages Of Sweden
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