Jarmo Lainio, was Full Professor of Finnish at Stockholm University 2008-2022 and at Mälardalen University, Sweden, 2003-2011. He was born in 1955 in Finland. His family moved to Sweden in 1959. He took a BA in English, German and Finno-Ugric languages at Uppsala University, where he wrote his Ph.D. thesis (Spoken Finnish in Urban Sweden, 1989). He studied Russian and Political Science of Eastern Europe at Uppsala University, and Japanese at Stockholm University. A scholarship in 1981 at Helsinki University in Finland substantially improved his Standard Finnish. In 1990-91 he was a guest researcher at the University of Ottawa, Canada. During the 1990’s he was project coordinator, researcher and lecturer at the Department of Finnish and the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University. He became Docent in 1994 (Tampere University, Finland) of Finnish, especially sociolinguistics. During the 2000’s he has performed research and participated in international networking. His scientific publications cover Sweden Finnish and Meänkieli, the sociology of language, sociolinguistics, educational linguistics and studies on bi-/multilingualism as well minority language policy. Within these areas and Swedish as a second language, he has functioned as a supervisor and opponent, as well as an expert, in a handful of countries. He was named Special Inquirer for a commission report by the Ministry of Education, on the education of the five national minority languages in Sweden (SOU 2017:91).