Katarina Barruk at the BBC Proms

Katarina Barruk, 2025

On August 31, 2025 Sámi vocal artist Katarina Barruk performed in concert with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra at the BBC Proms festival at London's Royal Albert Hall. It was a history-making event, given that she was the first Sámi performer ever to participate in the Proms. I read about this in the Barents Observer, which has a link to a broadcast from Radio Sweden, where she’s interviewed (in English). Barruk’s Sámi identity wasn’t the only thing notable about the event. Barruk sings and joiks in the Ume Sámi language, which is considered extinct in Norway and is severely endangered in Sweden. It was traditionally spoken around the Ume River in central Sweden, around towns such as Sorsele, Lycksele, Arvidsjaur, and Storuman, where Katarina Barruk was raised. Her father, one of only a handful of people to still speak Ume Sámi, is a language consultant and teacher whose work involves documenting and rivitalizing the language; in 2018 he published the first Ume Sámi-Swedish dictionary.

Katarina Barruk herself has been a language-immersion teacher as well as a musician; now she mainly concentrates on her work as a singer, appearing internationally and releasing videos and singles. Like another Sámi vocalist and activist, Sara Ajnakk, who I’ve written about before on this blog and who did not grow up speaking Ume Sámi but has painstakingly learned it and who writes many of her songs in it, Barruk has become a spokesperson for Ume Sámi. Much of the coverage of Barruk’s performance at the Proms mentioned the Ume language.

It wasn’t the first time that Ume Sámi was in the news in England—I was able to find an article in the Guardian from 2014, “Reindeer herders, an app and the fight to save a language,” which gives a good overview of the language and the efforts to revitalize it. In the article, Katarina is mentioned as a “young, passionate advocate for access to language education,” who is “currently recording her first album using Ume Sami lyrics and influences from the traditional Sami Yoik.”