Learn about the Sami people
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Intro |
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| Hi everybody! Anette here. Welcome to Ask a Teacher, where I’ll answer some of your most common Norwegian questions. |
| The Question |
| The question for this lesson is… Who are the Sami people and what language do they speak? |
| Explanation |
| The Sami people are the indigenous people of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Sápmi is the name of the area where they live, and this encompasses northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola peninsula of Russia. |
| Today, they are protected. However it hasn’t always been that way. In the past, they suffered under many restrictions by different governments. |
| There were several different groups of Sami. One was the Skolt Sami, who lived off of reindeer herding, fishing, and hunting. There was the Mountain Sami, who moved together with their reindeer out from the mountains and to the fjords in the spring. The Sea Sami, didn't have big reindeer packs, but they lived by combining fishing, hunting and agriculture. And the Forest Sami, worked in the woods and did not move out of the mountains like the Mountain Sami when the spring came. |
| The Norwegianization of the Sami was a policy made to assimilate the Sami into Norwegian culture. This started at the end of the 1800s and continued to 1965. In 1888, you had to be Norwegian or Swedish to buy land in Norway, and in 1902 you had to be Norwegian to buy land in Finnmark, a region where most of the Sami lived. To get Norwegian citizenship you had to speak and write Norwegian, and this caused many Sami to change their family name to something more Norwegian. Several laws also banned the Sami language and people were not allowed to use it, so a lot of the Sami language got lost. |
| The Sami language is a branch of the Uralic language family. The Sami languages are divided into Western Sami and Eastern Sami, with subgroups and different dialects. Some can be intelligible, but others not so much, due to geographical barriers. The most common is Northern Sami, which has around 20,000 speakers in a subgroup of Western Sami. Lule Sami and Southern Sami is also used. Now, The Sami and Norwegian languages have equal standing in Norway and several schools offer Sami, and some universities in Northern Norway offer Sami too. |
| The Sami was recognized as an indigenous people in 1990, and Sami in Norway has special protection and rights. They also have their own constitution day on the 6th of February and their own Parliament. |
Outro |
| How was this lesson? Pretty interesting right? |
| Do you have any more questions? Leave them in the comments below and I’ll try to answer them! |
| Hade! Vi sees senere! |
| Bye. See you later! |
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