Sami in the Media: Questions of Language Vitality and Cultural Hybridisation

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss language vitality and cultural hybridisation as taking place in the indigenous, transnational and partly diasporic Sami community and their media. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data on Sami journalists, children and a rap musician, I focus on two central aspects emerging from the data: the implications involved with Sami-only language policy adopted in Sami media and the impact of globalisation, particularly in terms of transnationalism, on Sami media. As Sami media function in a complex multilingual terrain of language endangerment and revitalisation, and multilingual audience and community, the issues of relative value of languages and identity construction are central. This paper argues that indigenous Sami media are a nexus where global and local interact resulting in simultaneous, partly contradictory processes of strengthening of cultural Sami identity and hybridisation of it.