Inari’s Children of Revival

Special nurseries are helping the Sámi people in Finland to bring their almost-lost language back from the brink of extinction.

It's -8C (17.6 F) and snowing heavily, but in Inari, a village in Lapland, 350km (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle, that doesn't stop nursery children from going outside to play. Bundled up in colourful warm clothes, they're busy building snow forts and tunnels, as their excited chatter resonates through the cold air.

The words thrown around are in Inari Sámi: an indigenous language that's only spoken in the area of Lake Inari in Finland, and one that was on the brink of extinction just a few decades ago. 

In 1995, only two families spoke Inari Sámi to their children, and just four speakers were under the age of 20.

"At that point, it was quite a typical opinion that the Inari Sámi language was going to die out," says Annika Pasanen, professor of sociolinguistics at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. "Most speakers were elderly and they didn't have many opportunities to use Inari Sámi, so it was spoken very little."

Everything changed, Pasanen says, when local children began taking part in a novel, immersive language experiment. The programme has transformed a language that was once considered doomed after being inspired by indigenous language revitalisation projects in New Zealand, the other side of the world from Lapland.

"There aren't many other examples of the status, prestige, and the use of a language undergoing such a change," Pasanen says. "It is one of the most exceptional revitalisation cases in the world."

Indeed, the efforts to save Inari Sámi are widely cited as one of Europe's most successful examples of indigenous language revival. But the language's resurgence has also raised questions about who it is for, whether saving a language can ever be separated from the history that nearly erased it and what to do if resources dry up.

- Author: Erika Benke, BBC

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