After decades of prejudice in Sweden, Ume Sami is spoken by fewer than 50 people. Today the last speakers have turned to technology to revive the indigenous language

The gates open and the herders take us into a 300ft-wide circular pen. Away at the other end, 200 reindeers are running in a tightly-packed circle. Amid the silence of the forest, all you can hear is the strange, dull “clck clck” noise of the tendons in their feet.

It’s December and I’m deep in the snow-covered forests in Lapland, north Sweden with a group of Sami herders – the indigenous people of this region – and their reindeers. While it feels as if I’ve been dropped into an animated Christmas card, it’s the herders not the reindeers that I’m here to meet and the conversation is not exactly festive.

The herders are among the last speakers of Ume Sami, one of at least five Sami languages spoken in Sweden. Today, it is spoken by fewer than 50 people.

Understanding why the language has become endangered is impossible without unpicking the complicated past and present of being a Sami in Sweden. “There is a deep wound in Sami culture and it is still bleeding,” says Oscar Sedholm, our guide from the NGO Såhkie Umeå Sami Association.

Prejudice, tourism and wounds that are still bleeding

The herders identify themselves as Sami, a recognised indigenous population from Sapmi - a region that stretches across the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Samis are one of the five national minorities of Sweden and there are an estimated 20,000 in Sweden today. Reindeer herding has been a traditional Sami livelihood for centuries, but fewer than 2,500 people are still actively involved in this type of work.

In the past you weren’t allowed to speak Sami in schools; it was ugly, you were ashamed to do it Katarina Burruk

To be a Sami in Sweden has not been in easy in the past and is not without its complications today, but you would be forgiven for remaining blissfully unaware of this as a tourist. They, alongside the snowmobiles, northern lights and the sights of Stockholm, are a central tenet of the Swedish tourism brand. You can pay to visit Goahti - their traditional housing. You can buy models and postcards of them in their colourful traditional clothing - or Gákti as they are called - in gift shops. A Sami doing a traditional Yoik won Sweden’s Got Talent this year. The Sami culture has been embraced and boldly put forward as a central part of the programme of the Swedish city Umea festivities as European Cultural Capital of 2014.

But the kitsch, celebrated version of Sami culture neatly packaged for tourist consumption is at best incomplete, and at worst misleading. The speakers of Ume Sami tell a different story: one of an institute set up in the 1920s for racial profiling, community fragmentation, name changing and today particularly high suicidal behaviour among Sami women and reindeer herders. Like so many indigenous people around the world, Samis have found themselves, their rights, and their livelihoods intertwined with conflicts over land rights and natural resources. In 2011, the UN special rapporteur strongly criticised Sweden for its failure to tackle some of the most pressing issues for Sami people and to date it has yet to ratify the ILO convention 169 designed specifically to protect indigenous rights.

While, generally speaking, social attitudes have improved in Sweden, prejudice remains: some of it subtle, some explicit. My hotel is in the centre of the northern city of Umea, and it doesn’t take long for glimpses of prejudice to start chipping away at the smiling tourist veneer: in snide remarks at hotel bars; overhearing the use of “Lappish” to pejoratively describe Samis; or when a Sami friend wearing the same traditional Gákti that you see on tourism posters is heckled outright in the street.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum is Björn Söder. Although he has claimed he was quoted out of context, and his views were widely criticised, in an interview last week the Swedish Democrat said that it would be problematic if there were too many people “who belong to other nations” and had non-Swedish identities. He singled out Samis alongside Jews and Kurds in Sweden.

A lost mother tongue

The irony is that for many Samis this assimilation into Swedish culture and the shedding of Sami identities has already been great, and the costs have been dear. One of the biggest casualties of this process has been their language.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patrik Lundgren shares the name he has given for the marking on his reindeer’s ear.

Ume Sami, along with the many other Sami languages, stems from the Uralic linguistic family and is rich in words to describe the natural environment with unusual precision. It has at least 100 words to describe snow, how it behaves, and how it may behave tomorrow. There are words specific to reindeer herding that can’t be directly translated into Swedish or English. The herders tell us that one example of this is the name given to the intricate and individually unique markings made on a reindeer’s ear to indicate whom it belongs to. Today, this language features on the Unesco endangered languages list under the category of “critically endangered”.

Katarina Burruk, a young Sami speaker and passionate advocate for access to language education, says the current state of the language can only be understood with reference to its history: “We are living with the consequences of the past … before you weren’t allowed to speak Sami in schools; it was ugly, you were ashamed to do it. People refused to speak or to pass it on.”

Susanne Stenberg, a Sami teacher in the northern town of Arvidsjaur, spoke about the ways in which she still carries around the legacy of her family’s experiences. While her grandparents were native speakers, her mother was forbidden to speak Ume Sami and as a young child Susanne was asked to leave the room if her grandparents were going to use the language.

Anders Ruth, one of the reindeer herders I met on my first day, spoke passionately about how the societal shame of the language was mirrored in his family home: “To protect me, my grandmother refused to teach me Sami.”

Fortunately, the place of Sami languages has improved in the Swedish education system. In 1998, the Swedish government apologised to the Sami people for the country’s oppression of the Sami. The refusal to let them speak and learn the language was, along with forcible displacement, cited as an example of such oppression. In 1999, the Swedish Riksdag approved the ratification of the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the protection of national minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In 2009, the government introduced a new minority policy that outlined a responsibility for protecting and promoting the languages of the country’s national minorities.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anders Ruth: ‘To protect me my grandmother refused to teach me Sami.’ Photograph: Pete Stovin

While generally welcomed as signs of progress, these remain largely rights in theory than in reality. Access to education can differ from place to place, but Susanne describes how in fact children receive next to nothing of Sami language education. In Arvidsjaur, where she works (a town with a strong Sami heritage), the tuition is patchy and inconsistent. “After New Year, we don’t have anyone to teach. Not for the small children, not for those in schools, and not for my daughter.”

“We do have rights. By law we have the right to read Sami in school in Sweden, but it is never that simple or easy. You always have to argue,” says Katarina who, as a native speaker of Ume Sami has been left exasperated by her experience of the Swedish education system. “We [Katarina and her brother] have been fighting our whole lives to just get one lesson a week in Sami.”

Estrangement from the language has left many with complex feelings about their Sami identity. Henrik Burruk, Katarina’s father and an academic working on the orthography of the language, said: “If you are Sami then you feel if you can’t speak it, or express yourself in the language ... You are in pain.” Susanne, who is learning the language as an adult, describes the feeling as “a part of you missing and you don’t know what it is.”

Young Samis healing old wounds

It would be natural to presume that Ume Sami, with fewer than 50 speakers, to be just one of the many stories of “dying” languages: quaint historical relics in the tragic but inevitable slope to extinction.

The Ume Sami speakers I met were undoubtedly mourning the mother tongue they felt they haven’t had the opportunity to voice. But the other half of the story is one of growing pride in Sami identity and a passionate push to revitalise the language.

The fight to preserve and reinvigorate the language has had a strong injection of enthusiasm from young Samis. Hugo Lundgren, 17, who is currently working alongside his father to learn the skills of herding, is extremely shy until we get onto the subject of his Sami identity, where he seems to forget any social inhibitions and becomes animated and forthright. “Our generation has realised there is nothing shameful about being a Sami. It is instead a strength.” Despite knowing only one other young Ume Sami speaker, Hugo is taking lessons in his spare time on top of his school studies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hugo Lundgren says Sami language and identity is no longer a source of shame. Photograph: Pete Stovin

Katarina describes how this strength is being channelled into a “cultural explosion” in Sami art, music and film. She is currently recording her first album using Ume Sami lyrics and influences from the traditional Sami Yoik.

Amanda Kernell is a young Sami filmmaker whose latest short Stoerre Vaerie (Northern Great Mountain) has been shortlisted for 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The film uses Sami actors, sections of Sami dialogue, and is the first-ever Sami film to compete at the festival. This is a significant moment for the Sami community; “Sami people are not represented at all in mainstream Scandinavian film,” says Kernell.

The main character in the film is an elderly lady who was born into a Sami family and grew up speaking the language but has grown bitterly prejudiced against Sami people. It is a personal tale deeply familiar to many Sami families, says Kernell. “Everyone knows someone who left [their Sami community] and really cut off all bonds.”Many of the Sami extras in the film said they already knew this exact story.

Amanda says it has been easier for her generation to address “wounds” in Sami culture that were often too painful for her grandparents’ generation who grew up with the racial profiling of the 1920s and 1930s, and what she describes as an apartheid-style education system.

The story feels like an elegy to those who left their Sami identity behind and reincarnated as Swedish. Yet the film is also about atonement, symbolised by the use of language. The death of the main character’s sister forces her to confront a heritage that by “becoming Swedish” she has long denied. In one moving scene at the wake, the woman whispers, “I’m sorry” in Sami into her ear of her dead sister.

Language revitalisation

Young Samis are lifting the lid on the painful experiences of previous generations and increasingly ready to speak their mother tongue without shame. But with few speakers, fewer teachers and levels of funding that Susanne describes as “absolutely ridiculous”, there are still huge practical difficulties before many can tell their own stories in their own words.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anders Ruth describes two different types of snow in Ume Sami.

When I meet the community of speakers, I find they are placing their hopes in an app. The Memrise learning app is a platform that allows users to input words or phrases and create their own language course. The Ume Sami community began to use the app without the company’s knowledge and are now experimenting with using video clips to capture correct pronunciation and inject character into the online documentation of the language. “When you haven’t heard the language for one generation, it is very hard to bring it back. To have it orally is very important,” said Henrik. It is now being used by other endangered Sami languages such as Pite Sami.

Using the app as a learning tool has distinct advantages. Firstly, it connects the speakers to each other. While still joined by family links, most of the speakers are scattered across the region. Where Ume Sami learning and conversation is taking place, it is in small, informal groups and very dependent on voluntary community efforts. The app has the potential to bring together these individual efforts into a collective, tangible resource. Secondly, it could potentially plug glaring gaps in formal teaching and access to learning resources in the Swedish education system.

Yet the process of digital documentation is seeing its share of teething problems. The fact that the language is not yet formalised is one of the larger obstacles. Other than a 17th century bible written in Ume Sami there are few written examples of the language and it does not yet have an official dictionary.

I would have been working for something else if I felt for one moment that it wasn’t possible to revive the language. Henrik Burruk

Surviving in isolated small pockets and individual homes, it has evolved with differences in spelling and even word meaning from speaker to speaker. This has resulted in internal frictions over how the language should be preserved. Fluidity and variation are common to most languages, but in the case of Ume Sami, it may not have time for internal stalemates.

Nevertheless, most speakers are stubbornly optimistic about the future of the language. “I would have been working for something else if I felt for one moment that it wasn’t possible to revive the language,” said Henrik, who is working on the first official Ume Sami dictionary.

How far an app can go in saving an endangered language remains to be seen. As does the question of whether the speakers can balance the desire for authenticity in the formalisation of the language against the ticking clock.

What is clear is the strength of emotion binding these speakers to the project. For some, the language is the phantom mother tongue they feel an urge to make the sounds of but don’t have the teachers to tell them how. For others, it is a language they can speak but no longer have anyone to listen.

For a great many, it is the language they tried to forget but couldn’t fully exorcise. The husband of a lady who works in the old people’s home tells me that many of the residents who grew up in the generation that was forbidden to speak Ume Sami, return to their mother tongue when they get dementia.

Meeting the speakers of Ume Sami was a moving insight into something, particularly as a native English speaker, I had found difficult to fully comprehend: what stands to be lost when a language dies. Without this recognition, it’s easy to remain ignorant of how far the language you identify as your own shapes how you see the world and who you think you are.

When the last speakers tried to explain in interviews, it was not only the sounds and phrases that stood to be lost, or the hundreds of years worth of knowledge that they carry, but – as they resorted to hand movements – something beyond words.

Read more: