A friend first told me about an article in English by a Norwegian librarian at the Trøndelag county library in Norway. Morten Olsen Haugen is working with the Sámi community to translate and publish more children's books, everything from picture books to YA to audio books, in the south Sámi language.
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| Morten Olsen Haugen, librarian and publisher |
South Sámi is one of the smaller Sámi language groups, with an estimated 600 to 2500 speakers, mostly in Norway (compared to at least 20,000 speakers and readers of North Sámi in Norway, Sweden, and Finland). Although more adults and children now study and speak south Sámi, there have been fewer resources for them.
Until around ten years ago when the Trøndelag county library jumped into publishing. Since then around a hundred books have been published.
According to Morten Olsen Haugen, "While we acknowledge the need to develop indigenous voices and
literature, we could not sit and wait for these books to emerge.
"We needed to publish a large quantity of books at a rapid pace. When we started, there were 2-3 new children’s books in southern Saami each year. We’ve published more than 10 each year.
"There is also the matter of language policy here. We want to bring the Saami language outside the traditional areas of their users’ culture. Saami children should be able to use their heart language even when they read – and talk – about pets, football, pirates, princesses, ghosts and monsters."
For readers of Norwegian (Nynorsk), here's a link to one of Haugen's own posts describing the project in greater detail. The images here are taken from that post.
