Abstract
This article presents and discusses Sámi social media initiatives for strengthening languages. The Sámi are the Indigenous people of Europe. All Sámi languages are endangered, and the lack of resources for maintaining, promoting and teaching the languages has been underscored on several occasions by the European Council and the Sámi parliaments. Social media has become an arena where resources are created and shared, enabling communities of speakers to support each other and promote their languages. YouTube, blogs, Twitter and language learning applications are here discussed as public domains and community-grounded media. Based on a few examples and on our expertise as instructors within Sámi studies, we suggest strategies for developing long-lasting and innovative models for revitalizing threatened languages and cultures, and for counteracting language loss through social media. This contribution shares examples of innovative uses of social media in Sámi of relevance for other Indigenous contexts.
With a well-developed Internet infrastructure, a relatively low-priced access to fast connection speeds and a high degree of digital literacy, most Sámi people, the Indigenous population of Northern Europe, can today have access and contribute to knowledge-sharing online and through digital media. Social media, more specifically, has become an arena in which resources are created and shared, and that enables communities of speakers to support each other and promote their languages. In a Sámi context, this can be observed both within and outside institutional frames. This article describes the applications and uses of digital media for Indigenous language learning and teaching. Based on our expertise and experience of digital media applications to language teaching and learning as instructors within Sámi studies, we suggest strategies through social media for developing long-lasting and innovative models for revitalizing threatened languages and cultures, and for counteracting language loss.
The Sámi context
The Sámi people are the Indigenous people of Northern Europe. The Sámi live in Russia in the Kola Peninsula, in northern Finland, in mountain and coastal areas of Norway from north to Mid-Norway and in Sweden in a large region that stretches from the northernmost regions to Mid-Sweden, from the mountains to the coast (see Figure 1).
Map of Sápmi (map created by author).
The Sámi people have been subject to colonizing measures ever since the leaders of the Nordic Kingdoms, and later, the nation-states of Northern Europe, started making claims over the ancestral lands of the Sámi in the first centuries of the second millennium. Colonization of Sápmi escalated from the 1500s onwards, with central government introducing taxation, state laws and Christianity that soon replaced the societal structures and nature religion of the Sámi people. The establishment of state borders gradually affected the nomadic lifestyle of Sámi people, forcing them to stay mainly within one country of residence and sometimes in new areas, thus creating conflicts between different groups of people. This coincided with heavy language assimilation policies that guaranteed the majority languages a strong and dominating position in the delivery of Sámi education from the end of the 1800s until the late 1970s. Although the Sámi experienced a collective ethnic awakening in 1970s, Sámi politics, questions concerning land and linguistic rights, education and livelihoods have evolved in different directions in the four countries where the Sámi live. Today, the Sámi share many political interests such as a linguistic revitalization and resistance to extractive mining industries, but they also develop national Sámi politics that can have very different local priorities1.
The estimated number of Sámi people is between 50,000 and 100,000. North Sámi is the dominating Sámi language. At most 30,000 North Sámi have some cultural or linguistic connection to their heritage culture. However, the number of people who actually speak Sámi and use the language daily is less than 15,000 (Outakoski, 2015: 7). As a result of oppressive and social Darwinist ideologies and politics of assimilation, all Sámi languages are today endangered. The long-standing assimilative policies have been the result of colonization, the formation of national states and the Western ideology of White epistemological supremacy (Minde, 2003).
In this article, we focus on the digitally enhanced learning and sharing experiences that can vary between being very local to being regional, national or even global. We also acknowledge that the heterogeneity in the Sápmi area implies that various groups of speakers have different prerequisites, interests and approaches to digitally supported learning, and we take into consideration the variety of needs articulated by different Sámi groups. Initiatives are taken by individuals, groups and associations to create, develop and share resources, and to support language learning. Digital tools and social media platforms play a significant role in these vernacular innovations. Therefore, we have chosen to provide examples of relevant educational resources that emerge outside institutional frames.
Approaches to Indigenous innovation and creativity
Similar to many other Indigenous peoples, the Sámi people find themselves in a language contact situation, where the native languages and the traditional culture have for a long time been under tremendous pressure. The Indigenous political, ideological and philosophical movement has been gaining strength from the 1970s and onwards, and has created space for resistance, revival and the development of Indigenous education and philosophy in general (e.g. Kovach, 2009; Simpson, 2001; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) and for Sámi voices in particular (Porsanger, 2004; Seurujärvi-Kari, 2012). In this context of linguistic and cultural revitalization, the establishment of Indigenous peoples’ own ideological spaces becomes a matter of central importance (Hornberger, 2009). In the Sámi context, the process of identifying the appropriate and adequate spaces for cultural and linguistic revival started only a few decades ago with the creation of Sámi political institutions and educational institutions.
Previous research has underscored that a central prerequisite for language revitalization initiatives is that the language should be used in as many domains as possible (Fishman, 1991; Huss, 1999; Hyltenstam, 1996). Thus, a threatened language has better odds of surviving when it is used in private as well as professional spheres, at home, at school, in the media, at public events and so on. Another key aspect to successful language revitalization is a positive change in attitudes (Grenoble and Whaley, 2006: 13). A key factor for measuring the vitality of languages is the extent to which younger generations use and develop their languages. The expansion of learning spaces to the realm of social media is an important step in winning new ground and domains for Indigenous languages and culture.
What is innovative in every distinct context depends on the needs of the group and the resources available. Sámi scholar Gunvor Guttorm explains that ‘[…] when approaching cultural expressions, creativity is a process, and when you look at how creative humans are in the process, it is important to bear in mind that it is not only the result that matters’ (Guttorm, 2011, English summary). Guttorm underlines that Indigenous creativity springs from ideas and implementations that belong to the process, as opposed to the Western tradition of innovation which is interested in the products and the results that can be turned into a profit. According to Guttorm (2011: 15), Indigenous innovation and creativity are about adaptation and improvisation, and the process itself can be seen as innovation or renewal.
Initiatives for the application of innovative educational programmes and efforts for promoting and developing native languages have been successful in other Indigenous contexts. Innovativeness can be connected to the transformational and adaptive processes of implementing traditional teaching models to the present and future situations (Kai’anui, 2012); it can also be connected to the use of new tools such as podcasts as a means for self-reflection, feedback and gaining the ownership of learning experiences (Switalla-Byers, 2016), or, for example, to its ability to take place at multiple levels utilizing community engagement and mentorship between tradition bearers and younger generations (Brand et al., 2016: 268). Olthuis et al. (2013) underline the importance of practical efforts in the re-creation of a suitable language environment and formation of a group of speakers that can revitalize the language. The next section exemplifies how such environments are being created in the Sámi context, and how the new arenas are engaging emerging groups of language learners and culture bearers.
Digital learning experiences and knowledge-sharing in Sápmi
We now take a closer look at social media–supported learning in Sápmi. Based on our experience as researchers and educators in Sámi Studies, we have chosen to focus on four learning spaces, namely, YouTube, blogs, Twitter and user-generated content in a language learning mobile application. These examples are representative illustrations of vernacular efforts that have had significance in learning and teaching situations, and received attention in Sápmi, for instance, in the media.
YouTube
The Google-owned video-sharing and hosting service YouTube allows users to upload, view, rate and share videos; to start their own broadcasting channels; and to subscribe to the content in other channels. YouTube content can also be kept private or be shared with a limited group of users, thus making it especially interesting for Indigenous users who can create and share culturally sensitive materials. The content can be used and embedded on other educational and learning platforms.
An example of user-created content is the popular game-sharing experience called Playthrough. This means that the viewer can watch how a gamer plays a game using screen-sharing and self-broadcasting services. In 2016, a group of Sámi gamers started their own gaming channel Sámi speallit (Sámi gamers) on YouTube that is connected to their Facebook page. 2 The videos show the gamers playing popular computer games such as Minecraft and Undertale alongside a continuous flow of comments and remarks. The innovation of this approach lies in the expansion of traditional language arenas to YouTube and user-created videos. In itself, this is not an Indigenous innovation, but the two Sámi gamers who have started this channel bring in another dimension to Sámi language learning and identity development, as they have chosen to communicate in two different Sámi languages – instead of combining a minority Sámi language with a national majority language. The fact that the videos display contemporary popular games creates a direct link between local language and global popular culture. Moreover, the Playthrough videos reframe the original content of computer games as potential vehicles for promoting and developing languages. This project was quickly noticed by the Sámi news media, which underlined the importance of creating media content in the Sámi language for young speakers who otherwise have very little access to popular content in Sámi (e.g. Torikka, 2016). The contents of the channel seem, however, to indicate that it has been dormant since 2016. This is typical of projects that are limited in time, staff and other resources. Accordingly, some of the biggest challenges of many Indigenous projects are sustainability and missing guarantees of continuity that are crucial for fighting the long-lasting effects of assimilation.
Blogs
A blog or weblog is ‘a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first’ (Walker, 2005: 45). The content of a blog is usually literary and may also contain pictures and photos. Blog writing is a truly positive trend in the field of personal writing in the Sámi languages and about Sámi matters. We approach this knowledge and experience-sharing platform with two examples that have had very different trajectories. Although these two blogs are quite different initiatives, they both share the desire to produce literary and literacy content in and for the Sámi language.
The first example is the Ihpil blog (2007), 3 authored in the style of a journal where the reader could follow the life and thoughts of a 19-year-old Sámi woman. This young woman started writing the blog in August 2007 as she moved to a Norwegian city to study. She writes about her struggles in the city, and about her search for identity as it becomes clear that she is lesbian, which has for a long time been a taboo subject in Sámi society. This blog is written in North Sámi, and the author also uses English and expressions associated with modern youth culture and youth language. The profile of the author and the blog has been visited over 1600 times. In 2007, the blog also had active followers who commented on the entries in an intriguing dialogic manner, using mostly North Sámi, and occasionally English. The last entry in the blog was from 17 December 2007 when Ihpil was preparing to leave the city and travel home by boat. In 2008, a book was published with the blog entries and the reader finds out that the young woman in the blog died in a tragic accident on the day of the last blog post. In 2010, a Norwegian translation was released. Shortly afterwards, a journalist investigating the story discovered that the blog was an art and literature project conducted by a well-known Sámi author, Sigbjørn Skåden. Skåden told the Norwegian media (Lieungh, 2011) that he had been experimenting with the genre of blog writing and saw a need for producing new literature for young Sámi readers. He also wanted to start a debate on homosexuality. Such a debate never arose, and many readers said they felt duped when the identity of the writer – a male – was revealed, and when the blog was presented as a literature project and not as a diary. Nevertheless, the impact of the innovative project has been significant: it encouraged readers to participate in a dialogue in their native language; it discussed and explored a world closed to many young Sámi who had a need to read and share their own thoughts on a sensitive topic; the project also explored new literary genres.
The second example is Čyete čälled (The one hundred writers), 4 a project from the Finnish side of Sápmi that targets Inari Sámi, one of the smallest Sámi languages. The project was initiated in 2016 in cooperation with their local Sámi association by Erika Sarivaara, University of Lapland in Finland, and Marja-Liisa Olthuis, the Arctic University of Norway. The activities include writing courses, real-life and virtual writing retreats, sharing and talking circles, and familiarization with computer-assisted learning and writing. A shared open blog functions as an archive at the same time as it is a living and developing writing project. The blog was initially the groups’ face outside and its heart inside the project but has grown into a network of blogs and home pages. The initiators write in the blog that although Enare Sámi has been strengthened in the past decades, before the project only 300 to 400 pages of written Inare Sámi were published annually and only a handful of Inare Sámi were able to write in their mother tongue. The main goal of the project is, therefore, to recruit a hundred Inare Sámi, and to teach them to write and produce texts in their heritage language. As yet, this ongoing literacy and revitalization project has not reached its goal of one hundred writers, but the number of writers is increasing steadily. Today, the project is owned by the Inari Sámi association, and the original blog is connected to the association’s own home page, 5 where also the local Inari Sámi magazine is publicly available to the readers in digital form. This innovative project feeds the ongoing revitalization process by showing the value of community engagement and sharing experiences. Although the blog focuses mainly on improving writing skills and producing Sámi literary content, it complements other components of the project and adds interactive and collective features that facilitate writing.
Twitter is a micro-blogging service for information-sharing and communication through short texts of a maximum of 280 characters (140 characters until November 2017). Twitter users access the updates from the account they choose to follow, or follow and track messages marked with a specific hashtag.
The social networking service Twitter is a global platform, but local communities find ways for adapting the functionality of the medium to their specific needs and interests. This becomes evident when studying the use of hashtags by Sámi speakers and language learners (Cocq, 2015). Following the hashtags #gollegiella (meaning ‘golden language’ in North Sámi, enhancing the value given to the language), #sámegiella (for ‘Sámi language’) and #åarjel ‘South’, for South Sámi, we could observe how communities of (language) users create a system for filtering, sharing and producing knowledge. Hashtags are widely used in social media as a form of informal taxonomy, in order to make it easier to find posts based on a specific topic, place or other content enhanced by the choice of hashtag. Tags ‘allow users to participate in the development of a classification system and interact within a system’ (Park, 2011: 521). In other words, hashtags enable users not only to categorize but also to develop social networking processes that stimulate knowledge-sharing. The categorization system that takes shape through the collective use of specific hashtags constitutes a folksonomy, a ‘bottom-up classification of resources by users and is a result of using personal tagging to form a data structure’ (Nair and Dua, 2012: 310).
The posts tagged with the selected hashtags #gollegiella, #sámegiella and #åarjel are status updates, links to resources or short texts concerning, for instance, language learning or the conditions for Sámi speakers today. 6 Twitter users in the network provide encouraging comments to each other, for instance, when someone expresses frustration about the learning process, as well as providing advice and support for translations. Bilingual messages are common, such as, for instance, ‘Gærjagåetesne. På biblioteket’ [At the library], and indicate that the Twitter network is used for (tentative) translations and addresses several audiences at the same time. It is also a form of strategic multilingualism and an affirmation of linguistic vitality, increasing the visibility of the Sámi languages – otherwise seldom represented in public domains and media.
The social networking service Twitter is an example of an innovative Indigenous use of social media to reinforce the use and the visibility of the Sámi languages. Through the use of hashtags, communities of speakers create networks to support and encourage language use and learning. The folksonomy created by collective hashtags forms a reflective and interactive web classification from an emic perspective. This is particularly empowering in the specific case of Indigenous groups who have limited access to information in their Indigenous languages and rarely on their own terms. In parallel and in interplay with institutional frames such as educational institutions, this illustrates how social media is an arena where Indigenous voices find ways of sharing and creating resources, collaborating and communicating in ways other than through other media or within traditional teaching resources.
Language learning mobile application
The project Viässuoje mujtuoh (Living Memories) 7 was a language project carried out by Såhkie – Umeå Sámi Association and Álgguogåhtie – Umesamer i samverkan (Ume Sámi people in Collaboration) from October 2016 through May 2017. The purpose of the project was to contribute to the revitalization of the severely endangered Ume Sámi language by making words and phrases readily available online to language learners. The project was funded by municipalities in the Ume Sámi language area, the Sámi Parliament in Sweden and the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore.
As a starting point, the needs of the Ume Sámi community were investigated through the Facebook group Vi som vill bevara umesamiskan (We who want to preserve the Ume Sámi language), a public group containing around 500 members, both speakers/learners of Ume Sámi and people who have an interest in the language. Many are striving to revitalize their language, and social media (the Facebook group) serves as a social hub for discussions regarding Ume Sámi.
At an initial stage, the project organized sessions with a few mother tongue speakers. The project had to find a balance between elderly mother tongue speakers and second-language speakers of Ume Sámi: mother tongue speakers had a fluency in their language and good pronunciation, whereas younger learners of Ume Sámi might identify more easily with younger second-language speakers. Although elders were consulted and contributed to a great extent with content (words and phrases), most of them were reluctant to be recorded. The project therefore made a decision to record only audio with younger people, of whom some were mother tongue speakers, or language activists and teachers in Ume Sámi. That would empower younger speakers/learners of Ume Sámi and also promote the notion that Ume Sámi is a language not spoken merely by elderly people. This choice was also motivated by the fact that the project needed to be appealing to schoolchildren attending mother tongue education. Words and phrases were also collected from a rich Ume Sámi material in the archives of the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore. The extensive archival material written in phonetic script had to be standardized according to the recently approved Ume Sámi orthography.
The words and phrases together with the audio recordings were made available online as the first free course in Ume Sámi. Distribution was organized via Memrise, a user-generated learning platform that uses flashcards as memory aids. It is structured in various chapters about different topics. The exercises within each chapter follow a progression, from multiple-choice questions to written answers where the words and phrases have to be spelled correctly. Memrise allows you to add audio recordings and pictures to the words and phrases. Memrise is available free as an app and is thereby accessible on mobile devices. Among the affordances of this app is the possibility to access the material online and practise the language regardless of time and place. Also, the users can find each other and follow each other’s progression. In this example, the innovation again lies in the organization of the project that relies on community efforts, collective choices and a careful plan for the most optimal sharing solution for this particular group.
We conclude this section by noting that efforts for revitalization need to be implemented in a culturally sensitive manner if we want to meet the goals of promoting, strengthening and developing the Indigenous Sámi languages as a long-term objective. The collaborative and collective process behind the production of resources is one of the most prominent strengths in Sámi uses of social media for promoting and teaching languages. Content generated by speakers makes it possible to compile resources that would otherwise remain isolated and restricted in extent. Successful Indigenous projects develop out of collective community efforts facilitated by digital and social media.
Towards successful and long-lasting innovation
This article has introduced a few examples of social media use for language learning and teaching in Sápmi. These illustrate innovative Indigenous projects that make use of digital technologies and social media in order to create and share resources for language learning, and that aim at language revitalization.
YouTube, blogs, Twitter and mobile applications offer ways of producing educational materials and of meeting the needs of the community in a faster and cheaper way than before. Although these initiatives often take place outside institutional frames, they are easily applicable in formal educational programmes. Such examples are also interesting, as they make use of global media and tools that were not created with Indigenous languages in mind, and they find ways to adapt these media and tools to local and culturally specific contexts. These innovative uses of social media services illustrate the potential of redefining and adapting existing technologies in order to meet the needs of a community. The specificity and complexity of Indigenous contexts in language revitalization processes imply that global solutions are hard to find. We are convinced that local initiatives based on the specific needs and interests of the speakers and language learners are a more efficient way to proceed.
Based on these few examples, our professional observations, our working experience as instructors and our analysis and reflections, we can discern some key aspects of successful social media innovation projects that aim at language learning and language revitalization in Sámi contexts. We also believe that these can be of relevance for other Indigenous contexts:
Learning and teaching in Indigenous communities belong to a long-lasting language revitalization and decolonization process. The challenges experienced in a revitalization context are different from those experienced in majority language development contexts.
In long-lasting Indigenous projects, the focus of innovativeness is often directed towards the learning and teaching processes or the development of tools, materials and technological solutions for promotion of such processes. Products and results of projects are merely seen as a phase in the acquisition of the means for language maintenance, development and revitalization.
Many of the Indigenous innovation solutions are designed for the community members and are, therefore, often non-profit and non-commercial. The principle of sharing, underscored in other Indigenous contexts (e.g. Tuhiwai Smith, 2012: 162), is often central and motivates the choice of non-commercial platforms and tools.
Community engagement is a central prerequisite for successful language and culture revival efforts, and should, therefore, be considered as an important part of any Indigenous social media–supported learning initiatives. Community engagement is necessary in order to ensure culturally sensitive, relevant and ethically acceptable resources. Successful models ought to be local, emic and culturally embedded, based on the needs identified by the community, created for the community members.
We can conclude that the presence and use of languages in digital environments, and, for instance, on social media, imply that these languages expand to new domains. Social media are global online media and, as such, public domains. Innovation and creativity take place in new domains and spaces both in the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous contexts. The use of social media as language resources also reaches a younger audience, that is, the assiduous users of smartphones and social media. Including younger generations in efforts to strengthen languages is essential if we want to ensure revitalization. The commencement of a change of attitudes can be observed today, with young people being proud of their Indigenous languages. Social media use in this context is also a means for including new groups, for instance, Sámi speakers and learners in urban environments, that is, people who live outside the core area of settlement and thereby have no exposure to their heritage language.
Also, collaborations between educational institutions and community groups need to take place in order for knowledge-sharing to increase in all educational initiatives. An overlap between these two forms of actors exists, and collaboration takes place to some extent. However, the entwinement of efforts and initiatives within and outside educational institutions has to be developed and strengthened in order to compensate for the lack or scarcity of educational resources. Finally, both pedagogical support and long-term funding for Indigenous social media innovation are needed so as to see short-term projects become long-term language revitalization efforts and policies. Prerequisites have to be secured at a political level if we want to achieve long-lasting and noticeable effects on language and cultural revitalization.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We want to thank our two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and insightful comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We also wish to thank the Swedish Research Council (grant 2017-00474) and Umeå University’s School of Education for financial support.
