Sami

Where Sami Live

The Sami people (previously spelled Sámi and Saami, also previously called “Lapps” or “Laplanders,” though these terms are now considered derogatory) live in an area called Sápmi. This area includes approximately the northern two-thirds of Norway, reaching into Sweden just short of the eastern coast and extending east through northern Finland to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The Sami are historically a reindeer-herding people, though today only about 10% of Sami continue in this occupation.

Sami Population

According to recent estimates by the Sami Information Center, approximately 40,000 Sami live in Norway, 20,000 in Sweden, 6,000 in Finland, and 2,000 in Russia. Because the censuses in these countries do not include ethnic identification, these numbers are only approximate. The Swedish Sami Parliament Act of 1992 defines a Sami as a person in whose home Sami is or was spoken and who considers himself or herself to be Sami. Also included as Sami are people whose [Page 1188]grandparents spoke Sami in the home and people whose parents registered as Sami in the electoral register of the Sami Parliament.

The Sami Language

Sami is a Finno-Ugric language, related in language base to Finnish, and it is an official minority language in Sweden and Finland and an official language in Norway. The three main dialects of Sami (Eastern, Central, and Southern) are further broken into nine total dialects. Northern Sami, a Central Sami variant, is the most spoken dialect, with approximately 15,000 to 17,000 speakers. Some of these dialects are mutually understandable; however, the differences between others make communication impossible without translation.

Because of a lack of accurate census-taking, estimates on the number of Sami who speak the Sami language vary from about 20,000 to 32,000 in Norway alone. The governments of the lands included in Sápmi did encourage the use of the Sami language during certain points in history; for instance, during the period of colonization with Sami participation in Sweden beginning approximately in 1723, the clergy in Lapland, Sweden was required to learn Sami, and in the mid-1700s, new books in the Sami language were published. The late 1800s, though, saw a rise in assimilationist policy wherein the Sami language was discouraged and the majority language was the language of instruction and the church. The Sami people have worked to establish their language as a respected mode of personal and political communication. In 1971, the Sami Language Committee was established to preserve and promote the Sami language.

Political History of the Sami

The Sami people, whose situation has been compared by many scholars to that of the Native Americans in North America, were historically ruled by the countries on whose land they lived. Problematic in this situation was that the Sami were nomadic, following their reindeer herds. An additional problem arose as legislation presented by the governments, often without Sami representation, defined what it meant to be an ethnic Sami and created laws favoring certain groups of Sami. The nonherding Sami were most often overlooked because popular views strongly associated reindeer husbandry with this ethnic group.

...