Module 8. Identity and Language
Developed by
Hans-Jørgen Wallin Weihe
Bodø University College and Lillehammer College
Norway
Table of Contents
Key Terms and Concepts
Learning Objectives/Outcomes
Reading Assignments
Overview
Lecture
Supplementary Readings/materials
Study Questions
Glossary of Terms
References
Key Terms and Concepts
Identity
Verbal language
Nonverbal language
Anthropocentric
Non-anthropocentric
National
Ethnic
Learning Objectives/Outcomes
Upon completion of this module you should:
- Be able to discuss the importance and current problems of identity and language
among indigenous populations in the Arctic
- Understand the difference between an anthropocentric view of nature and that of a
non- anthropocentric view
- Describe the importance of using an indigenous or a national name to a person‟s
identity
- List some of the current problems facing Arctic populations regarding their language
and identity
Reading Assignments
Read the lecture and overview for Module 8.
Suggested Reading
Reading 1. Freire Paolo 1978 (or later edition): Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London:
Penguin Books
Reading 2. Corson D. 1995. Norwegian Sami-language act – emancipatory implications
for the world‟s indigenous peoples. Language in Society 24(4): 493-514, December
1995.
Overview
The aim of this module is to promote an understanding of language and identity. While
some sections of the module discuss problems relating to all humankind, the examples
are all from Scandinavia, Greenland, and other Arctic nations.
The social construction of language and how it is influenced by colonial encounters,
linguistic policies and how humans define themselves in relation to nature is discussed.
The emphasis is to show how living conditions, life style, changes in population and the
national policies have influenced language and identity for Scandinavian and
Greenlandic people.
Lecture
With the development of Northern autonomy comes an increased expression of that
autonomy. This is seen both in the efforts to revive and preserve indigenous languages
in the North, and in other expressions of indigenous identity. This has at times resulted
in conflict between indigenous populations and that of the majority cultures consisting of
people that historically have moved from lower parts of Europe into the Arctic. In the
northernmost part of Norway, for example, immigrants were attracted to the coastline by
the rich fisheries. Some of them came from Finland and some from other parts of
Norway. This produced regions in Norway with three different languages and cultural
traditions.
In Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden, tensions are evident between the Sámi
population and population of outsiders that have moved into that region. In Greenland
the majority population – the Inuit - have long been dominated politically and
economically by Denmark. Despite Greenland‟s achievement of Home Rule, it is still
dependent upon Denmark and outsiders such as medical doctors and other
academically skilled labour. Iceland is a notable exception having a fairly homogenous
population of people with a Nordic background and with their own carefully protected
language.
The limitations of language
Language is a broad concept covering both spoken and nonverbal language. Spoken
language is characterized by socially agreed upon vocal sounds or words combined
according to a mutual system. Human beings are, unlike animals, fairly unrestricted in
what they can communicate with spoken language about. The spoken language can be
put into written form. Nonverbal communication includes other forms of standardized
communication such as gestures.
Different cultures witness great variations between what they communicate with words
and what they communicate without the use of words, or as the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein described as „what we remain silent about‟.
How people experience the reality of their existence is of great importance to how they
relate both to their own life and to the life of others. An individual‟s conception of his/her
reality can be defined as his/her identity. Obviously the Arctic is a far different
environment than that of most of the settlers moving into it. (The exception being Nordic
and Russian settlers who have traditionally lived along the northern coastline, in the
taiga or in mountainous areas, and have experienced conditions relatively similar to that
of the most southern part of the Arctic populations.)
Traditionally, living in the Arctic has meant being regulated by light changing from 24hour
light or semi-light to 24-hour darkness or semi-darkness. Living off the land has
meant that people have been dependent upon the cycle of animal life. Hunting has been
dependent upon animal migrations, ice and weather. Reindeer husbandry/reindeerherding
has been dependent upon the availability of lichen and other sources of food
being seasonable available. Fishing and trapping likewise is dependent upon the season
of the animals harvested.
Both religious beliefs and experiences of human identity have been influenced by the
lifestyle and pattern of the people in the Arctic. Language has been specialized in order
to communicate about important parts of living. For example the Sámi has a large
number of words and phrases about snow and snow conditions. Those differences are
obvious adaptations to the environment. Differences developed speaking about the
spiritual world and human emotions are far more difficult to penetrate, as many early
polar explorers and missionaries discovered. One early example is the missionary Hans
Egede who tried to communicate about spiritual matters with the Greenlandic Inuit in the
early 1700s (Egede 1926 original 1741 and Hindsberger 1997).
An important question, of crucial importance to cross-cultural communication, is if
humans from different backgrounds can grasp different parts of reality. It is good reason
to believe that the identity developed through close interaction with the Arctic
environment have made people see a world in a far different way from those living under
other conditions.
As David Abraham (1997: 73) points out: “Every attempt to definitively say what
language is, is subject to a curious limitation. For the only medium with which we can
define language is language itself”. In a way we are trying to grasp a phenomenon that
might be different in different cultures with tools that makes us totally unable to do so.
Nordic and Greenlandic Languages
Sami
According to Pekka Sammallahti, the Sami language is more accurately referred to as a
group of dialects; indeed “speakers of different varieties can barely understand one
another even in the most elementary matters of daily life.” (Sammallahti 1990, 437) The
Sami language group belongs to the Uralic family, which includes 25 million speakers in
21 languages, including about 6 million Finnish speakers. Nine Sami language areas
are traditionally recognized, including i) South; ii) Ume; iii) Pite; iv) Lule; v) North; vi)
Inari; vii) Skolt; viii) Kildin and ix) Ter. (You can see the locations of the nine Sami
dialects on Page 418 of Arctic Awakenings
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0008/000861/086162e.pdf) An estimated 35,000
people speak Sami – 20,000 in Norway, 10,000 in Sweden, 3000 in Finland and
perhaps 1500 in Russia. The majority (approximately 80%) speak North Sami, and as
few as 400-500 speak Inari.
Greenlandic
The official name of the language of Greenland Inuit is kalaalit oqaasii (or kalallisut)
which means the language of the Kalaallit or Greenlanders. Greenlandic is a relatively
very well preserved indigenous language, with nearly 80% of the 103,000 Eskimos
speaking it, and it is still used as the main medium of communication in daily
Greenlandic life (Petersen, 1990), with West Greenlandic as the most common dialect.
Greenlandic or Kalaallit is one of four groups of the Inuktitut language, which includes:
Iñupiaq (northern Alaska)
Inuinnaqtun (Canadian Western Arctic)
Inuktitut proper (Canadian Eastern Arctic)
Kalaallit or Greenlandic (Greenland)
Inuktitut is related to the Aleut language, and together they form the Eskimo-Aleut family.
All Eskimo-Aleut languages are polysynthetic languages, characterized by characterized
by a synthesized root and a large number of affixes that create long words with
sentence-like meanings.
How many words do the Inuit have for “snow”? According to linguist Steven Pinker,
“Contrary to popular belief, the [Inuit] do not have more words for snow than English.
They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two
hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at
two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such
standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche,
hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, [and] dusting.” (Pinker, 64)
Icelandic
Icelandic is a North Germanic language, and as such is a sub-group of the Germanic
family. Linguistically, it is most closely related to Norwegian and Faroese. Iceland was
settled in the 800-900s, but its language remained very close to Norwegian until the 14th
century. Two defining characteristics of the Icelandic language are its resistance to
change, demonstrated by the ability of Icelandic readers to understand the Sagas which
were written in the 12th
Century, and its lack of dialects. Icelandic is an inflected
language (meaning the word form is changed according to grammatical function) of
moderate complexity.
Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
The Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages are closely related and mutually
intelligible. They form part of the North Germanic language group, and though
pronunciation varies from country to country, the written version, particularly of Danish
and Norwegian, is close. Indeed, some dialects within borders are more pronounced
than between the individual languages. Together, the three languages are spoken by
about 15 million people.
Norwegian has two official written forms - Bokmål (Standard Norwegian, or literally
“Book Language”), used by a large majority (up to 90%) of Norwegians, and Nynorsk
("New Norwegian") which is based on the provincial dialects of selected districts, mainly
in western Norway. Swedish is also the mother tongue of about 6% of Finns and is an
official language of Finland.
Finnish
Finnish is unrelated to the Scandinavian languages and is a member of the Finno-Ugric
language family. Finnish has about 6 million speakers, mainly in Finland, though a few
speakers exist in Norway, Sweden, Russia and Estonia, and in fact Finnish is an official
minority language in Sweden.
Language and Identity
Language and identity are closely linked; indeed, some surveys of Sami populations are
based on the number of Sami speakers, or people who had at least one parent or
grandparent speak Sami as a mother tongue.
One of anthropology‟s most durable and perhaps necessary assumptions is the
association between language and local identity (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). Steedly
(1996:447) questions the association between language and local identity through
examination of linguistic policies and education programs in a colony. Her conclusion
was that outsiders, through linguistic standardization, vernacular education and
translation, produced “a set of linguistic resources for rule and resistance” for the
population‟s identity. Thus the intention of linguistic standardization and translation could
be just the opposite as the result.
Standardization of language has been attempted in most of the Arctic world. In the USA
(Alaska), Norway, Russia and Sweden, it has been part of national policies to have one
national language. In Finland and Canada the situation has been more complex having
two official national languages. However, in both of those cases, minority languages like
those belonging to the Sámi in Finland and the Inuit and First Nations of Canada have
not been thought of as equal to the official national languages. Greenland has been a
Danish colony and had for many years a similar policy, giving priority to the Danish
language. In fact, in all the cases above, minority languages have in periods been
discriminated against and historically have tried to be eradicated. Iceland is a different
case having one homogenous population with a strong objective of promoting and
protecting the national language.
For indigenous populations, like the Inuit and First Nations in the Canadian and US
Arctic, the colonialism of outsiders have brought important changes to the fabric of local
communities and families. The harsh policies of the past of removing children from their
families, educating them in “national” languages, not allowing them to use their own
language and interfering with traditional religious practices have brought both a loss of
language and cultural identity, as well as pride (Millroy 1999). Children lost not only their
own language but also the ability to communicate with their own parents and elders.
In recent years policy has changed, now acknowledging the importance of local
indigenous languages. The blatant discrimination of yesterday has been replaced with a
strong emphasis upon maintenance and sometimes reconstruction of local traditions and
language. That is not always an easy process. In some cases traditional languages have
been replaced by one national language. In Finland, Norway and Sweden that is very
much the case for a large portion of the Sámi population no longer being in command of
their traditional Sámi language. The same situation can be found in other arctic countries
having their local languages replaced by national ones.
Even within the traditional arctic populations, the standardization of indigenous
languages has been a common policy. In Greenland, for example, the development of a
“Greenlandic language” characterizes differences in the spoken language as dialects.
Thus it is possible to pursue a policy of one Greenland nation with one language as
opposed to a policy of a Greenland with several different languages. Interestingly, the
Sámi population in Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden gives emphasis to differences
in the Sámi language and acknowledges nine or ten different Sámi languages. Ironically
the Sámi linguistic Pekka Sammallahti (1998) points out that if those differences are not
acknowledged as languages but as dialects, then similarly Danish, Norwegian and
Swedish should be defined as German dialects.
Arctic outsiders such as teachers, preachers/missionaries, linguists and public
administrators have played an important role in language standardization and
translation. In many cases missionaries were pioneers who worked to standardize
language and to translate Biblical texts. Translating religious and biblical texts required
extensive standardization. As Sammallahti (1998) points out, the Sámi language several
local variations but the translations “created” a more uniform standard.
Emphasizing the similarity of the different versions of the Inuit language, Inuktitut, might
serve to strengthen the unity of Inuit‟s across borders of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and
Russia. In the same way, emphasizing the similarity of the different versions of Sámi
might strengthen their unity across the borders of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia.
It is possible to claim the standardization process helped to unite the Sámi into one
group and in that way helped to strengthen Sámi resistance against the nationalizing of
their culture. On the other hand, such standardization reduced the uniqueness of the
local and put the language under foreign linguistic control. And, eventually, they represented
it back to its speakers, in its now orthodox form, as a gift of civilization
(Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:223).
Both in the Inuit and Sámi case the control of the language is now mostly in the hands of
intellectuals from their own people. It might be claimed that they operate according to
principles inspired by outside linguistics and political thought.
One example of the increased expression of autonomy and willingness to support an
indigenous Arctic language is the Sámi Language Act enacted in Norway and Finland in
1992. (The Finnish Act is available at http://www.finlex.fi/pdf/saadkaan/E0031086.PDF ).
The Act established the principle of bilingual education. Even though some suggest, as
the Canadian researcher D. Corson (1995) does, that the act had emancipatory
implications, it also made visible the severe injustice and discrimination made towards
the Sámi as part of Norwegian nationalism.
The ability and resources to teach indigenous languages in schools are critical to
maintaining dialects and languages, and subsequently identities and cultures. The use
of the Greenlandic language in schools, even in the 1950s and 1960s, has played a
large part in the preservation of that language. The increasing use of indigenous
languages in mass media – television, radio and newspapers - while standardizing
languages, has also assisted in their preservation, and state support, particularly for the
Sami, has been increasing.
Identity and names
During a stay in Siberia the summer of 1997 I visited an Nganasan family living at a
place called Paiturma in Taimyr. The older male member and head of the family, told me
that he thought a standardized written language was alien to the traditions of the
Nganasan culture. In his opinion the backbone of his culture was the oral tradition, which
he thought would be “killed” by the development of standardized written language. The
Nganasan culture, consisting of a few hundred people, has no written language but
there are those trying to standardize the language both out of scientific linguistic interest
and in order to translate the Bible into that language.
Rydving (1993:127) discusses the importance of a person‟s name as an aspect of
identity. During my stay in Siberia I visited Nenets living east of Jenitsei River. All of
them had a Russian name as well as an additional Nenet name. The later was not told
to outsiders. In Rydving`s discussion a similar double name system use in Scandinavia
was discussed: “The double name meant, above all, that there was no risk that
foreigners would get access to the indigenous names, and through them the identities
they represented. The Sámi name of the individual was in this way protected from being
sullied and used for malevolent ends by Scandinavians”(ibid). I would like to emphasize
the importance of a person‟s name for his/her identity. Thus giving a person a “Christian
European national” name would possibly have a great symbolic significance for the
person. If the person kept, or had an additional secret indigenous name, it would also be
of importance.
In the same way, the names we give to objects, animals, places and natural phenomena
will be of importance. Changing those names back on maps and landmarks from the
“nationalized colonial” to the local traditional might then also be of great importance.
Looking at maps in Greenland and the Sámi areas of Norway, that is a policy being
actively pursued in order to acknowledge and strengthen local traditional culture.
Factum verum
For the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, the only way humans can relate in a
meaningful way is through what they themselves have done, or in Latin “factum verum”
(what is done is truth) (Tristram 1983). Thus from his view our whole identity and
language is concentrated around what we have done. Obviously that will be greatly
different for an academic from New York, a fisherman and part-time farmer from Iceland,
a reindeer-herder from Norway, Sweden, Finland or Russia and a trapper and hunter
from the Canadian north. It will also be greatly influenced by structures in society such
as the Nordic welfare state and the economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union.
Availability of education, training and salaried work will vastly change the experience of
the individual. The academic of 2004 might very well come from a small Greenland
community having received his training at the University of Copenhagen or some other
university.
In the Swedish Geography Professor Gunnar Olsson‟s (1995) view, the problem of
understanding other cultures is a problem of the chemistry in “the glue”. In his opinion
the relationship between the signifier and the signified is dependent upon social cultural
glue through which words and objects, expressions and meanings are glued together.
The problem is then that the glue might be different in different cultures. He concludes
(ibid: 21); “In all its many possible implications the conclusion is still one. We are living –
today as always – in a time the world and concepts, object words and meaning do not fit
together. To find the road we have to depend upon maps of the invisible, maps which
themselves are invisible. But who knows? Unthinkable thought! Maybe the map
metaphor itself is obsolete, the geography changed to metagraphy. The history of the
perspective shows that as soon as a creation becomes a habit, it‟s no longer functioning
as questioning what we take for granted, but as a technique for preserving it”. It is a
complex process in which even the signifier might become unfixed. From that point of
view it would always be a process with at least a potential of partly reversed roles.
Because only part of such a process would be conscious it is difficult to analyze; “It is
the realm of partial recognition, of inchoate awareness, of ambiguous perception, and
sometimes, of creative tension: that liminal space of human experience in which people
discern acts and facts but cannot or do not order them into narrative descriptions or
even articulate conceptions of the world: in which signs and events are observed, but in
a hazy translucent light, in which individuals, or groups know that something is
happening to them but find it difficult to put their fingers on quite what it is (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1991:29). Often, I would argue, we do not understand or notice what is
happening. The example of translation of the Bible that has happened all around the
Arctic is illustrating. Often translation must have violated both the “native” language of
the missionary/translator and that of the local language. As Comaroff and Comaroff (ibid:
218) write about a translator of the Bible, “He had created a counterpart of the
scriptures, at least as he read them, in the tongue of the natives – as he had come to
understand it. In short he had transposed the Bible into a cultural register true to neither,
a hybrid creation born of the colonial encounter itself”.
The Arctic has very much been an area of colonial encounters. Local cultures have been
dominated and ruled by outsiders. Quite often to they have been dominated to the
extent that the local population have identified with the values and ideas of the outsiders
– or to put in the terminology of Paolo Freire (1978) of the oppressor. In the same way
Adorno (1974) points out that the language of the subjected has been stamped out by
domination in which they have choice to live without the ideas of the dominant group.
The coda that will never come
The coda is the final passage of music. It is usually elaborate or distinct. The
development of identity and language is a never-ending story. It has clearly been
influenced by the human encounter with nature. Without doubt people living in extreme
climatic conditions will have to relate to nature in other ways than people living under
other conditions. They have always had to do that and they will always continue to do
so.
The Arctic world is no longer isolated. It is very much part of the rest of the world. People
communicating have always influenced each other. To a greater extent than at earlier
times at least part of the population living in the Arctic will be able to live “insulated” from
their environment. The tension and interaction between those living in closeness to their
environment and those insulated from it is likely to be of great importance for the
development both of identities and language in the Arctic
It is difficult to predict the future. However we do know that Arctic peoples in the north in
recent years have made efforts to revive and preserve indigenous cultures. How
successful those attempts will be remain to be seen. It is up to all of us to participate
actively in the future.
Most likely what happens among humans will be greatly influenced by forces outside of
their control. Climate change, harsh winters and storms might very well be of greater
importance than modern technology (Gamble, Davies, Pettit and Richards 2004 and
Chylek, Box and Lesins 2004). In the long run no human can completely insulate
her/himself from his or her environment.
Supplementary Readings/materials
Corson D. 1995. Norwegian Sami-language act – emancipatory implications for the
worlds aboriginal peoples. Language in Society 24(4): 493-514, December 1995.
Freire Paolo 1978 (or later edition). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin
Books
Lévi- Strauss Claude 1978. The Meeting of Myth and Science . Toronto : Routledge
The Meeting of Myth and science and “Primitive thinking and the “Civilized” Mind
Study Questions
1. Discuss the importance and current problems of identity and language among
indigenous populations in the Arctic
2. Discuss the difference between an anthropocentric view of nature and that of a nonanthropocentric
view
3. Discuss the importance of using an indigenous or a national name to a person‟s
identity
Glossary of Terms
Anthropocentric and non- anthropocentric: The American philosopher Max Oelschalger
(1991) sees a major difference in cultures between those cultures that see humans as
part of nature and those who see humans as separate from nature (anthropocentric view
of nature). According to such a view the indigenous cultures of the Arctic have
represented non-anthropocentric cultures.
Ethnic: An ethnic group is bound together by common ties like race, nationality,
language and culture.
Identity: An individual‟s conception of his/her reality
Indian: Native population of most of America. Towards the north the Indian population
borders the population of Inuit‟s.
Inuit: The word Inuit means “the people”. They are widely called “Eskimos”. The Inuit‟s
populate the Arctic from Greenland in the east, across northern Canada and Alaska to
the eastern part of Siberia. There are about 110.000 Inuit living in the Arctic. The
language of the Inuit is called Inuktitut.
Koyukuk Indians: Named after the Koyukuk River in central Alaska, a major tributary to
the Yukon River. The Koyukuk Indians are part of the Kutchin Indians a group of
Athabascan –speaking Indian tribes. The Kutchin Indians were neighbours to the Inuit
people living further north. In the late 20th
century about 2000 Kutchin survives. The
name Kutchin means “people”. Historically speaking they were hunters and traded both
with Indians further south and with Inuit‟s in the north.
Language: is a broad concept covering both spoken and nonverbal language. Spoken
language is characterized by socially agreed upon vocal sounds or words combined
according to a mutual system. Human beings are, unlike animals, fairly unrestricted in
what they can communicate with spoken language about. The spoken language can be
put into written. Nonverbal communication includes other forms of standardized
communication like gestures.
National/Nationalism: While a nation is a unified territorial state with some kind of
unifying political system, concepts like “National Pride” and “Nationalism” are used much
wider than that, Nationalism representing a policy of having the nation as the highest
goal and loyalty. As part of a policy of nationalism a one nation, one language and one
culture policy was pursued in many countries. The Nordic countries are good examples
of nations pursuing nationalism through a policy of one nation, one culture and one
language. Such policies often led to discrimination of minorities like the Sámi in Finland,
Norway, Sweden and Russia.
Nenets: Ethnoliguistic group living in northwestern Russia. The northernmost part of the
Nenets are the tundra Nenets consisting of about 25.000 people. They inhabit Russian
arctic from the Taimy peninsula and the Yenisey River in the east to the White Sea in
the west.
The word Nenets means, “man”. The Nenet culture has been centred on reindeer
herding, some fishing and hunting.
(In Russian singular Nenets, in plural nenetsy, formerly Samoyed or Yurak – in older
literature the later forms might be used).
Nganasan: A high small group of people (less than thousand) inhabiting the
northernmost part of the Taimyr Peninsula. The Ngansans are related to the Nenets.
Formerly reindeer herding people, nowadays mostly reindeer hunting
Sámi: Traditional population of the northern part of Finland, Norway and Sweden and
the Kola peninsula of Russia. In the late 20th
century the official numbers of Sámi were
6000 in Finland, 40.000 in Norway, 20.000 in Sweden and 2000 in Russia. Traditionally
reindeer herding and nature based activities like fishing, hunting and small-scale
agriculture has been the most important part of the economy. Today the Sámi is very
much part of the modern economy of their home countries, however nature based
activities remain both culturally end economically important.
(The name Sámi is also spelled Saami, Same, Sabme and sometimes called Lapp)
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