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Aims
& background
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SLDR
- Aims & Background
Aims of the
schoolThe school is specifically designed for advanced
students, scholars, language teachers and activists who are interested in Saami
languages. The courses will provide a solid grounding in the objectives of contemporary
documentary linguistics. Theoretical, practical, ethical and technical aspects
will
be covered. The focus lies on documentary linguistics, but the winter
school will also provide practical training in methods of language maintenance
and revitalization, especially how to make use of language archives (like the
DoBeS or the HRELP archives) and corpora (like the Giellatekno corpora) for research
and revitalization. Some courses will also address issues involved in archiving
and
processing of legacy materials, i.e., old texts, field notes and recordings.
General
background and objectives
The Saami languages
form the westernmost branch of the Uralic language family. Saami has a history
independent from their nearest relatives of at least 3,000 years and is thus irectly
comparable in age to the Germanic language group. The
Saami language area today stretches from Trøndelag in central Norway and
adjacent (see map here).
Dalarna in Sweden over the northernmost provinces of Norway, Sweden and Finland
to the eastern tip of the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. During the last
centuries, the area of Saami settlement has diminished significantly and large
parts of the Saami population
have been assimilated into the majority population
in the respective countries resulting in language shift towards to respective
majority languages.
Today, all Saami languages must be regarded
as endangered; most of them are seriously endangered or virtually extinct already. Saami
is among the most endangered language groups in Europe. There are currently less
than 30,000 speakers of nine living Saami languages. The great majority of those
speakers, however, speak North Saami. The smaller languages have at best a few
thousand speakers left.
Ume, Pite, Ter
are not actively spoken any longer and face extinction in the near future. Kildin,
Skolt, South, which are still actively spoken by few people face a crucial situation
right now: community-based revitalization efforts are increasingly acknowledged
and supported by official regulations. However, these projects tend to lack resources
and sufficient staff with appropriate experience and training. On the other hand,
there is a long tradition of linguistic fieldwork on the Saami languages and there
are at least some materials available for all of them. But much of this data is
unpublished, out of print, difficult to access and written with specialists in
mind. In other words, there is much information available that could be better
integrated and tapped by more diverse users – especially those who stand
to profit most from it, i.e. speakers, teachers and learners but also the general
linguistics community. Thus, the
Saami languages provide an opportunity for integrating legacy materials and contemporary
documentation into a form that can be used for a variety of research, revitalization
and education purposes. The last decade has seen a new interest in studying, preserving
and vitalizing the Saami languages. The efforts have often originated within
the
Saami community. A new and well-functioning Inari Saami language immersion daycare
program (“language nest”) in Inari serves as an example. Otherwise,
successful efforts to halt language decline and support language revitalization
are almost exclusively limited to North Saami communities of Norway. There
is also an increasing interest in the Saami languages in theoretical linguistics
and typology. Saami languages or Saami linguistics are included in the curricula
of several institutions of higher education; for example, Helsinki, Kautokeino,
Murmansk, Oulu, Umeå, Uppsala and Tromsø. The proposed summer school
will be of interest for students and
teachers at these departments, as it will
provide an excellent opportunity to learn about recent efforts in the field of
documentary linguistics which have lead to a significantly increased level of
methodological, theoretical and technical sophistication. We
believe that the proposed summer school will be of interest and use for several
different types of participants. It will primarily attract students and scholars
directly interested or engaged in documenting one or more of the Saami languages.
The summer school will also be useful for students of Saami languages and Saami
language activists who wish to find out more about various aspects of Saami, get
training in linguistic elicitation and documentation techniques, and learn about
issues of language revitalization. Also, the courses will be of interest to theoretical
linguists who work on Saami or other minority languages of northernmost Europe,
and who want to combine researching specific aspects of the languages with documenting
the languages more generally. back
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