The Language Nest

The Sámi are an indigenous people from the northern edge of Europe, where they inhabit areas within four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. There are nine Sámi languages. The speakers of the various Sámi languages can understand each other’s speech to some extent, but generally the languages are the less mutually intelligible the greater the geographical distance. The most widely spoken Sámi language is Northern Sami with some tens of thousands of speakers in Finland, Sweden and Norway. There are only a few speakers of the smallest Sámi languages left. All Sámi languages are endangered to different degrees, and the communities where these languages are spoken are making efforts towards revitalising and strengthening the languages. One of the most effective tools of revitalisation is the language nest activity, which has had a significant role in, for instance, the revitalisation of Inari Sámi, which is spoken in Finland.

In 1996, the situation of the Inari Sámi language appeared hopeless. The number of native speakers was estimated at around 350, most of whom were elderly with a smaller group being middle-aged. There were a few speakers under 30 years of age, but none of pre-school age. The revitalisation of the language had already begun; the Inari Sámi Language Association Anarâškielâ servi was founded in 1986, the own-language magazine Anarâš came out a few times a year, and books and recordings became available from time to time. Inari Sámi was taught in schools as a mother tongue or as a foreign language, language courses for adults were organised occasionally, and radio programming was broadcast for an hour every week. Most Finnish people were unaware that several Sámi languages were spoken in Finland, and Inari Sámi was hardly seen or heard on either local or national level. Revitalisation did not appear to change the direction of the language shift, and the children of the community grew up to be speakers of Finnish. There was every reason to fear that Inari Sámi as a spoken language would disappear within a few decades.

In December 2006 Anarâškielâ servi celebrated its 20th anniversary in Inari. Over a hundred people, representatives of all age groups from babies to elderly people, attended the party. Almost all speeches were made in the Inari Sámi language. Children ran around the room and under the tables, watched over by the smiling parents. The biggest difference was that all of the children knew Inari Sámi. They understood what the older people said to them in Inari Sámi, and answered in the same language, although they used Finnish with each other in their games. What had happened in the last ten years?

An Inari Sámi language nest had been founded in Inari.

A language nest is a day-care facility for pre-school age children in an area where a certain minority language is spoken. The idea behind the language nest is the same as in early, complete language immersion: the children who come into the language nest are mostly speakers of the majority language, and from their first minutes in the language nest, the carers will only speak the minority language to them. The carers do not use the majority language at all, but the children are allowed to use it freely. Thanks to their natural capacity for absorbing language, the children begin to understand the minority language very quickly. Normally they understand the everyday matters of the language nest within a few months. How much and how quickly the child will begin to speak the language varies greatly between children. Some children will begin to use words and phrases in the minority language immediately and to form complete sentences within the first months, whereas for some, language activation may take years. A few years in a language nest are usually sufficient for the child to achieve so called functional bilingualism and be able to, for instance, participate in minority language education at school.

The roots of the language nest activities lie on the other side of the globe, in New Zealand. At the beginning of the 80s, the indigenous M?ori people of the area realised that without drastic action, the M?ori language would become extinct within the next few decades. Because the generation of parents with small children had already grown up to be English speakers, a solution for language transmission for the children had to be found outside of the home. This led to the founding of language nests, i.e. M?ori language day-care centres, where older M?ori-speaking women spoke M?ori to the children all day. Some parents also took part in the activities, thereby learning the language along with their children. As the children in the language nests reached school age, a M?ori language educational system was developed for them where, depending on the school, all or part of the subjects were taught in the M?ori language. In less than 30 years, the language nest activity and own-language education has reached the majority of the children of M?ori families, and the use of the language has increased significantly in the community outside of the language nests and schools as well.

In addition to the M?ori language, language nest activities have had an important role in the revitalisation of, among others, the Hawaiian and Irish languages. The results have been similar everywhere: compared to the traditional couple of hours a week of teaching, language nests are by far the most effective at providing children with an active proficiency in a minority language. Language nests cannot of course replace the role of the home and parents. One big problem appears to be that the minority language does not often become a language that the children use among themselves in play and everyday activities. If the language proficiency and identity of the children is allowed to develop through own-language education, it is very possible that as they mature into adults, they will choose the minority language as the language spoken in the family home. There is not a lot of research regarding these long-term results, because the language nest is a relatively young phenomenon everywhere.

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The language nest is a well-known language revitalisation method also within the communities of northern minority language speakers. In Finland, the Skolt Sámi had a language nest in Sevettijärvi as a short-term experiment in 1993 and again in 1997-2001. The operation continued again after a hiatus in 2008, this time in Ivalo, and a little later the Sevettijärvi language nest reopened as well. The Inari Sámi started their language nest venture in 1997. An Inari Sámi language nest operated in Ivalo until 2001, and it was reopened in 2010 after a hiatus. There has been uninterrupted language nest activity in the village of Inari, with two groups currently active. Northern Sámi language nests have got under way only in the last few years. Day-care facilities operating in Northern Sámi have been provided for children who speak the language at home, but most of the time these facilities have not accepted children who do not know the language. However, the situation of the Northern Sámi language is so dire in places that language nests for children who haven’t learned the language at home would be desirable. Northern Sámi groups are currently active in Utsjoki, Karigasniemi, Vuotso, Oulu and Helsinki; the activity is about to begin also in Rovaniemi. There have been language nests in Sweden and Norway, too, at least in the Southern Sámi and Lule Sámi language communities.

If a child has to move from the language nest onto a majority language school, it is clear that the progress of language proficiency is halted. All of the language nest projects have therefore included efforts to continue the language immersion of the language nest children in school. This objective has had the best success in the Inari Sámi and Lule Sámi language communities. The language nest children of Tysfjord (Divttasvuotna) are able to receive the majority of their basic education in the Lule Sámi language, depending on the wishes of the parents. In the village of Inari, the children with a language nest background are offered tuition in Inari Sámi so that in the earlier grades it covers most of the subjects and by the time the children enter sixth grade, tuition in Inari Sámi accounts for a little over half of the syllabus.?In secondary school, Inari Sámi was for a long time only used as the teaching language in language tuition, but recent years have seen it become the teaching language for certain secondary school subjects as well. The situation of Inari Sámi has improved greatly in recent years, as intensive language training has produced more adult speakers from various vocational backgrounds. Skolt Sámi has been used as a teaching language less often than Inari Sámi, partly due to teacher shortages; it has been used to teach certain subjects, such as orthodox religion, in Sevettijärvi elementary school. Intense, year-round language training in Skolt Sámi has recently been offered to adults as well.

A project funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation was launched in 2008 with the aim of promoting language nest activities, particularly among the Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia. The project is managed by the Finland-Russia Society. In the early 2000s, the language nest method was used in only one place in Russia; Uhtua (Kalevala) in the Northern part of the Republic of Karelia. In the Uhtua language nest, children who have learned Russian at home have had a chance to learn Karelian, the language of their grandparents. The objective of the Finno-Ugric language nest project was to disseminate information about the language nest method and language revitalisation in the areas where languages belonging to the Finnish language family are spoken in Russia. This was realised through - among other things - seminars, which were organised in different areas together with local representatives. During the language nest project it became clear that the current circumstances in Russia make these language nest activities challenging. Adopting a language other than Russian as a day-care or teaching language is considered quite a radical approach in today’s Russia, when it is not considered suspect or even illegal. Still, it is a question of the linguistic rights of minority language speakers, and Russia has made a commitment to these rights in both national laws and a number of international agreements. As a direct or indirect result of the Finno-Ugric language nest project, many day-care facilities in the Russian regions where Uralic languages are spoken began to use the minority language. For instance, several Komi language groups based on language immersion were founded in the Komi Republic, and language nests were used in the Taymyr Peninsula in order to revive the critically endangered Forest Nenets and Nganasan languages. One of the main problems for language nest activity in Russia is that in most areas the school system uses the Russian language exclusively. If the language is not spoken in the home, there is a risk that the minority language proficiency gained in the language nest will decline and the language will be forgotten over the school career. However, it is recognised that even a shorter period of bilingualism has a beneficial effect on a child’s cognitive development. In addition, the language nest can in these cases also work as an incentive for language revitalisation in the community as a whole by encouraging parents and grandparents to activate and strengthen their own language use.

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Intergenerational language transmission is the most important indicator of the vulnerability and vitality of a language. If the children of a minority language community do not learn to speak the minority language, or if only a small part of them do, it is clear that the future of the language is threatened. In many communities the problem is that the parents of small children consider the minority language important and would like their children to learn it, but are unable to transmit it to their children at home because of their own lack of proficiency. In this situation there are two possible ways to reignite the language shift: the first is that the parents learn the minority language, for instance by taking language courses, and adopt it as the home language. This solution is ideal in the sense that the whole family adopts the minority language and the children achieve an active proficiency, as the most effective way to learn a language is at home. The problem, however, is that in order to learn the language actively the parent has to make a tremendous effort, and for many this is not possible due to work and family demands. In that sense the second option is easier: trying to transmit the language to the children outside the home in a language nest and/or a minority language school. The ability to absorb a language is much greater in children than adults, which means that in a language nest, the language is learned easily in the course of everyday activities, without any special study or effort.

Language transmission outside the home naturally presents various problems. The parents may think that the language nest and the school are taking care of everything, and that they do not have to worry about learning the language. However, it is important that the parents also acquaint themselves with the minority language, even if they are going to continue speaking the majority language at home. The less the child hears the minority language outside of the language nest or the school, the more likely it is that it does not become a natural communication language that they would later transmit in turn. The child can also sense the attitude of the parents towards the minority language. If the parents do not make efforts to learn it, it may be that the child will not want to take the trouble of using it either. The language nest cannot replace the role of the parents in language transmission - it can only partially complement it. ?

Why is the language nest such an important part of the revitalisation of endangered languages? In a nutshell: 1. The most common reason for the failure of revitalisation is that it remains the pursuit of only a small group of activists - teachers, researchers, politicians and NGO activists. One of the benefits of the language nest is that it affects the community as a whole as well as ordinary people. 2. The language nest forms the basis for all other revitalisation efforts. Ultimately, if the children will not speak the language, no other revitalisation efforts will save it - not magazines, books, teaching materials, radio and TV programmes, language courses or any standardisation activities. All of this is needed for strengthening the position of a language, but too often it happens that language transmission to children is not given adequate attention. Too often it is also believed that children achieve an active language proficiency by themselves or through two hours of language tuition per week. 3. Children who speak the minority language are a therapeutic factor for the entire community. The older generation especially may have internalised the idea that their own language is bad and unnecessary, and that it can only be used with others of the same generation. A child that is playing, singing and chattering in the minority language lets people know that times have changed. Unlike the Kven, Sámi or Karelian schoolchildren of the 1940s, the children of the language nests of the new millennium are not going to think of the minority language or bilingualism as a source of shame, problems or traumatic experiences, but a wholly positive thing instead.