Language
There is no single Sami language, but a group of ten distinct Sami languages. Six of these languages have their own written standards. The Sami languages are relatively closely related, but not mutually intelligible; for instance, speakers of Southern Sami cannot understand Northern Sami. Especially earlier, these distinct languages were referred to as "dialects", but today, this is considered misleading due to the deep differences between the varieties. Most Sami languages are spoken in several countries, because linguistic borders do not correspond to national borders.
All Sami languages are endangered. This is due in part to historic laws prohibiting the use of Sami languages in schools and at home in Sweden and Norway. Sami languages, and Sami song-chants, called yoiks, were illegal in Norway from 1773 until 1958. Then, access to Sami instruction as part of schooling was not available until 1988. Special residential schools that would assimilate the Sami into the dominant culture were established. These were originally run by missionaries, but later, colntroled by the government. For example, in Russia, Sami children were taken away when aged 1–2 and returned when aged 15–17 with no knowledge of their language and traditional communities. Not all Sami viewed the schools negatively, and not all of the schools were brutal. However, being taken from home and prohibited from speaking Sami has resulted in cultural alienation, loss of language, and lowered self-esteem.
The Sami languages belong to the Uralic language family, linguistically related to Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. Due to prolonged contact and import of items foreign to Sami culture from neighboring Scandinavians, there are a number of Germanic loanwords in Sami, particularly for "urban" objects. The majority of the Sami now speak the majority languages of the countries they live in, i.e., Swedish, Russian, Finnish and Norwegian. Efforts are being made to further the use of Sami languages among Sami and persons of Sami origin. Despite these changes, the legacy of cultural repression still exists. Many older Sami still refuse to speak Sami. In addition, Sami parents still feel alienated from schools and hence do not participate as much as they could in shaping school curricula and policy.
In Norway, the name of the language and the people is often spelled Saami; in Finland, the name of the language is spelled Saame and the name of the people Saamelainen.
Read more about this topic: Sami People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)