Overcoming silence: language emancipation in a coastal Sámi-Norwegian community

Abstract

This article examines the complexity of language emancipatory processes at the micro level in a small coastal Sámi-Norwegian community in Northern Norway. The local context of Olmmáivággi/Manndalen is characterised both by former Norwegianisation (1850–1950) and by ongoing revitalisation (1980–today). The analysis sheds light on the ways in which individuals living in Manndalen experience the historically changing and somewhat contradictory concept of language emancipation. The data presented are taken from interviews with two women who represent the extremes of a four-generational process covering the development from language shift towards language revitalisation. Their diverging accounts of these processes are discussed on the background of the historical transition from understanding Norwegianisation as language emancipation towards defining revitalisation as the same. In drawing attention to the speaker, the article seeks to deepen the understanding of the multifaceted history and reality in which micro-level language choices are embedded, and furthermore to emphasise that the most fundamental level of language emancipation is the level of individual language users: Languages are not in the need of emancipation; speakers are.