Statens hantering av forskningsresultat i rättsprocessen med Girjas sameby utgör ett hot mot Sverige som rättsstat och kunskapsnation. Åratal av svensk och internationell forskning underkänns och man använder ett språkbruk som skulle kunna vara hämtat från rasbiologins tid. Nu måste staten ta sitt ansvar och börja agera som en demokratisk rättsstat, skriver 59 forskare.
Contemporary globalization trends might be a threat to Indigenous language revitalization efforts, or might act as catalysts that stimulate interest in learning and writing in Indigenous languages. This chapter presents a snapshot case study of young multilingual writers of North Sámi and considers the interaction of supercomplexity and the super dimensions of Sápmi on North Sámi literacy. Using illustrations taken from 126 young writers' narratives texts collected from 12 schools across the North Sámi speaking area of Sápmi in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, this chapter discusses how these young writers express in written North Sámi what they do in their lives, their understandings of their identities, and how these reflect the global and the local dimensions that they engage in on a daily basis. Based on our analysis, together with earlier research, we argue that young writers have the literacy skills necessary for meaning making, but that more possibilities for exposure to North Sámi are required, coupled with structural support from policy makers, society generally, and education opportunities, to raise the linguistics competencies for more nuanced North Sámi writing.
This paper discusses the asymmetry in selectional restrictions found in the basic causative typology of Kayne (1975) and Burzio (1986), drawing heavily on data from the Finno-Ugric language Torne Sámi, proposing that the Base Object in Faire Par causatives participates in a Control-relation, which has the effect of reducing the kind of Objects that can occur in this causative type. In essence, the surface Object is not an argument of the Base Verb, but rather, it is an argument of the causative formative. However, no comparable restrictions are found in the Faire Infinitive construction. In these, the Base Verb can take the same range of complements that it can when it is used as a simplex matrix verb. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the surface object in Faire Infinitives is also the actual Object of the Base Verb.
Vinka (2002) and Svonni & Vinka (2002, 2003) brought attention to the fact that it is impossible to form productive morphological causatives based on unaccusative verbs in the Finno-Ugric language North Sámi. However, further inspection reveals that the ill-formed causatives under question can be alleviated, in fact they can be improved to full grammaticality, if one of the constituents of the clause undergoes wh-movement. In this paper, we argue that causatives with wh-movement involve a causative formative that has two pertinent properties: it exclusively selects for an unaccusative verb and it hosts a wh-feature. This wh-feature, in turn, Agrees with an appropriate element that it can access, contingent on syntactic locality conditions.
In Chapter 5 Mikael Vinka, Christian Waldmann, David Kroik and Kirk Sullivan consider the creation of corpora in the Saami language and how these can be used to support minority language education in pre-school. Using examples both from the CHILDES database and from South Saami they illustrate how corpora may support the development of culturally relevant teaching materials.
This presentation considers creation of spoken minority language corpora and how these can be used to support minority language education across the entire educational spectrum. The Saami languages are a group of minority languages spoken in Northern Scandinavia, Finland and Russia. In the Saami context there is currently one major language project that focuses on North Saami, Davvisámegiel mánáid giellaovdáneapmi (DASAGO), and is building two longitudinal corpora, one for monolingual acquisition and one for bilingual North Saami/Norwegian. Of the Saami languages, North Saami is the most widely spoken with approximately 25 000 speakers. The DASAGO project has no explicit educational objectives, yet its findings will be of relevance for the development of educational materials for North Saami. Another project creating an oral language corpus for a Saami language is Mávulasj, a spoken Lule Saami documentation project that has explicit educational objectives. Lule Saami has approximately 500 speakers. Creating spoken language corpora that are of relevance for education is complex. Drawing on the experiences of creating these corpora, we explore the complexities of spoken minority language corpus creation through an ongoing South Saami project based in Umeå, Sweden. South Saami is a language with circa 500 speakers and in contrast to North Saami the speakers are spread over a large geographic area. The low number of speakers, the geographical spread, and the even lower number of advanced first language speakers, poses additional problems for the South Sami spoken corpus’ construction, and its use in the development of education materials. Using examples, we illustrate how corpora can be used to support the development of culturally relevant innovative teaching materials that can assist in language revitalization, and illustrate how corpora can be misused and result in linguistically incorrect teaching materials.