Resumen de Sámi language mobility: scales and discourses of multilingualism in a polycentric environment
In a multilingual Lapland, globalization processes have various sociolinguistic effects. A good example is a change in the functions and values of the indigenous Sámi languages. The once solid community languages were pushed in the margins of the nation states in the early twentieth century. Today, Sámi linguistic and other semiotic resources are used not only for communication and building an indigenous community, but they function also as a commodity in global music markets and tourism, or as a resource for creative identity performance. This kind of a sociolinguistic change calls for an investigation that overcomes the macro–micro gap and concepts that address movements, diversity, and multiplicity in this multilingual situation. To this end, I fuse ethnographic and discourse analytical approaches in an attempt to track movements and conditions of Sámi resource mobility. The data examined in this article comprise multimodal discourse data (photographs, interviews, texts) and observations and recordings from ethnographic fieldwork in the North Calotte area of Lapland.
