A view from the periphery

Language: A Challenging Resource in a Museum of Sámi Culture

Choices made around using language in museums can either reinforce or challenge existing common sense language regimes and cultural hegemonies. The issues around linguistic choices are particularly pronounced for a museum of indigenous culture in a multilingual minority language community. Using the case of the Siida, the National Museum of the Finnish Sami, located in Inari, in Finnish Samiland, we explore some of the issues involved in using language in the museum. Based on a linguistic landscape analysis, we identify three main functions of language in the museum: managing and controlling visitors; narrating and explaining content and being displayed as content/exhibit. We discuss these …

Reflexivity and small languages

Transgression, small languages and changing boundaries

Minority Languages and Markets

This chapter explores how minority languages figure in economic development and are invested with values of expertise, distinction and authenticity. Drawing on previous research, including the authors’ own studies on minority and indigenous language practices and discourses in peripheral, multilingual Irish and Sami sites, the chapter discusses the changing and expanding role of minority languages in some key economic domains: advertising and marketing, tourism, the media and job markets. It reflects on the conditions and consequences of economic processes for the exchange value of minority languages in changing markets.

Gifting, service, and performance: three eras in minority-language media policy and practice

Adapting Tom Ricento’s (2006) three-era framework in language policy to the case of the Sami in Finland and Irish in the Republic of Ireland, we identify three key eras in the development of minority-language media: the gifting era, the service era, and the performance era. Each era has its own particular logic and normativities in relation to the value and functions allocated to minoritylanguage media, the key actors involved in these media, and concepts of languages and speakers. Although we observe a chronology in the evolution of these eras, previous eras do not simply disappear with this evolution. We argue instead that they are embedded in any single moment of media engagement in rela…

Small languages in new circumstances?

Commodifying Sami culture in an indigenous tourism site

Cultural tourism has become an alternative economic activity in many indigenous sites, and local tourist providers compete globally by commodifying their culture in an efficient, attractive manner. This process is not however a straightforward one, because of the need to manage both the multilingual context and the interaction between host and tourists, and this can lead to tensions for all parties. We examine a Reindeer Farm in the indigenous language space of Samiland. Based on a long-term ethnography, we identify different scripts which are used within the tourist encounter to pre-empt and manage tensions around the legitimacy of the host, the collusion and cooperation between host and t…

Expanding possibilities for commodification

Conventional and transactional authenticities in small-culture tourism

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery

This leading team of scholars presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users. The authors refer to this network of interlinked changes as the new conditions surrounding small languages (Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh) in peripheral sites. Starting from the conviction that peripheral sites can and should inform the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the book explores how new modes of reflexivity, more transactional frames for authenticity, commodification of peripheral resources, and boundary-transgression with hu…