The dialect boundaries do not follow the national borders, however, as most of the Sami languages are spoken in multiple countries. Sami language is currently the major language in inner Finnmark and is also used in small communities in most parts of Northern Norway as well as in some environments in the Northern Norwegian towns.
Around 2, Sami people in Norway make their living from herding reindeer, and the majority of the region of Northern Norway is actually used for raising reindeer. Traditionally, most Sami people have supported themselves through fishing, livestock farming, and hunting, along the coast, on the fjords and alongside the large rivers farther inland. Today, a large proportion of the Sami people live outside the traditional Sami areas and have moved into the towns of Northern Norway or to the Oslo area.
Even more, they still live in traditional Sami settlement areas but earn their living in the modern service sector, industry, travel and the public sector. Sami culture has many unique forms of expression. Joik, one of the oldest song traditions in Europe, is alive and well. A joik is dedicated to a person, an animal or a place, and the harmonies reproduce the qualities of the object of the song.
Sami boots filled with blister sedge will keep your legs warmer than the latest developments in survival equipment and are used diligently when the temperature drops below In the twenty-first century, Sami culture is meeting the modern world in a new way.
No Sami people live a completely traditional life today, and the everyday lives of many of these indigenous people appear very modern indeed. At the same time, however, interest in joik, duoddji and the language itself is increasing rapidly.
So by clicking on these links you can help to support this site. Mutual intelligibility There is quite a lot of mutual intelligibility between neighbouring Sami languages, however speakers of more widely separated languages cannot understand one another without learning or extensive exposure to the other language.
Russia The Sami people are recognised as an indigenous people in the Russian Federation, however their languages have no official status. Written languages The first Sami language to be used extensively in writing was Ume Sami : an Ume Sami translation of the New Testament was first published in , and a complete translation of the bible in Ter Sami saa'mekiill , an Eastern Sami language spoken in Russia by a small number of elderly people in the early s.
Learn languages on iTalki Join shareasale. Spoken in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Spoken in Finland, in the Municipality of Inari. Around people speak the language. Revitalization: The number of speakers is slowly increasing due to language revitalization efforts. There are around native speakers, most in Finland, and at least one speaker in Russia. This situation obviously entails a threat to democracy and equality.
Williams concludes, in his large study from Malawi and Kenya, that, "For the majority of children in both countries, the test results, and classroom observations, suggest there is a clear risk that the policy of using English as a vehicular language may contribute to stunting, rather than promoting, academic and cognitive growth.
For the maintenance and development of languages and thereby linguistic diversity on earth , educational language rights, including the right to mother-tongue-medium education, are absolutely vital.
Binding linguistic human rights education rights in particular might be one of the necessary but not sufficient ways of counteracting linguicide and linguicism. When we move from the non-duty-inducing human rights instrument preambles about the importance of languages to their binding clauses -- especially to the educational clauses -- language often disappears completely.
In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , for instance, the paragraph on education 26 does not refer to language at all; in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , the educational Article 13 omits reference to language or linguistic groups which are mentioned in its general Article 2.
If language-related rights are included and specified, the articles dealing with these rights are typically so weak and unsatisfactory as to be virtually meaningless. For instance, in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in force since ; Norway, Sweden, and Finland have ratified it for the Saami , the formulations in the education Article 8 include a range of modifications. Just as in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious, and Linguistic Minorities, the opt-outs and alternatives permit a reluctant state to meet the requirements in a minimalist way.
A state may claim, for instance, that a provision was not "possible" or "appropriate," or that numbers were not "sufficient" or did not "justify" a provision, or that it "allowed" the minority to organise teaching of their language as a subject, at their own cost. Revitalisation and even reclamation of earlier minorised languages are taking place. Amery describes encouraging work on reclaiming Kaurna, an Australian Aboriginal language whose last speaker died some 60 years ago.
The reclamation is mainly based on missionary documents dating from around The Maori, Hawaiians, and Saami use "language nests" in which preschoolers are taught in the indigenous languages by linguistically and culturally proficient elders. Often, their pre-school teachers and parents also develop more proficiency in the ancestral language. In immersion programs for these indigenous children, they are taught in indigenous languages that they do not know initially.
The training of teachers and journalists in, for, and through the medium of several small indigenous languages is expanding; in Arctic areas, for instance, indigenous peoples are also establishing their own universities.
MasterApprentice programs in California see Hinton, pair off proficient indigenous elders with younger people for months, 20 hours a week, for language revitalisation purposes; the only requirement is that they use an indigenous language. These are just a few examples. Despite such work, strategies to counteract the linguistic dominance and hierarchisation that may ultimately lead to the disappearance of the majority of today's languages are urgently needed.
Today's efforts are completely insufficient. We will mention some urgent tasks:. In many countries, even in modern countries like the Nordic ones, these kinds of basic data are lacking. We do not believe that a certain critical number of speakers is needed for a language to be maintained; it is more a question of finding innovative strategies -- making people aware of the potential and the globally invaluable knowledges embedded in every language and culture.
If a language is only taught as a subject, it is not developed in terms of vocabulary and discourse for use in all domains. Both are vital, and without using the language for purposes above the primary education level and everyday life, the language will soon be unable to function in other domains -- and what value does it have on the linguistic market if one cannot use it to discuss physics or politics?
Likewise, collective and individual rights do not compete; both are necessary and complement each other. If smaller-in-numbers language speakers feel that their languages and experiences are not being respected, they will not feel that resulting written languages are their own. Linguistic and orthographic self-determination is essential. Alternatives that use common fonts and can be used on TV and on the Internet -- and that ordinary people feel still represent the languages more or less fully -- must be developed.
As a rule, furthering real equality means that we have to support a minority language much more than a majority language. Every forum where the minority language can be used locally is immensely more important to it than to the majority language.
Equality is misunderstood if it leads to an equal division of time and resources between a minority and majority language. Without a rather radical turn in majority awareness in Scandinavia, teaching in Saami, and legislation to support it, would never have developed.
Since minorities often adopt the majority's attitudes toward minorities and their cultures, majority members must be supportive at the local and personal levels. States have the primary responsibility in all international cooperation and in the development of international law. The contributions from states like Norway and Denmark have been important in the process of developing instruments like the ILO Convention Linguistic human rights must be seen as a part of the general human rights system.
In Norway, conflicts have opened up a path toward constructive solutions. Handling conflicts over longer periods does take a much heavier toll on minorities than it does on majorities, however. Since , every Saami child all over the country has an individual right to the teaching of Saami as a subject in comprehensive school ages Within the Saami districts in the north they also have an individual right to be taught through the medium of Saami.
Outside this area, there must be at least ten pupils to claim this right Law on education The question is to what extent having high levels of competence in two or more languages that can be used for the same purposes always leads to monolingualism in a majority language as was thought earlier. Another question is to what extent does diglossia i.
A solution is that various systems always support and use the language that otherwise has fewer chances of developing to a high formal level. This is always the indigenous language, both for minorities and those in the majority population who want to become multilingual. Equality must always be seen in the light of the goals rather than in a mechanical way. A longer version of our article is in press in Huss et al.
Amery, R. Warrabarna Kaurna! Reclaiming an Australian Language. Series Multilingualism and Linguistic Diversity. Aikio-Puoskari, U. Language rights of the Saami in Finland. Series Juridica Lapponica. Helander, E. Huss, L. Reversing Language Shift in the Far North. Linguistic Revitalization in Scandinavia and Finland.
Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Uralica Upsaliensia Uppsala: Uppsala University.
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