Northern Sami Orthography - The Friis Orthography

The Friis Orthography

The Friis orthography was used in the Sámi version of the Bible published in 1895, in the Sámi newspaper called Saǥai Muittalægje and commonly associated with the Nuorttanaste, a religious publication of the Lapp Mission, which was first published in 1898 as it had used this orthography for many years, although it now uses the 1979 orthography for about half the articles. The one thing that makes this orthography different from all of the other orthographies used to write the various Sámi languages is that it is the one that greatest number of Sámi have learned over the last 100 years.

J. A. Friis starting working on translating the Bible since Stockfleth had only managed to translate the New Testament. Of great importance to the translation work being done was the Friis was assisted by people who spoke Sámi as their mother tongue. In 1854, Friis was joined by Hans Jacobsen Hætta, who had been sentenced to jail in Kristiania following the Kautokeino Uprising. In 1874, their reworked version of Stockfleth's New Testament in Northern Sámi was published. Friis went on to also publish the Old Testament in cooperation with Lars Jacobsen Hætta and Just Knud Qvigstad in 1895.