Strengthening the Literacy of an Indigenous Language Community

Aanaar Saami (Inari Sámi) literacy is weaker than that of majority languages in the sense that reading and writing Aanaar Saami is less common. In order to strengthen literacy, we argue for an approach that represents a methodology for participatory research from a community and an in-group perspective. We also discuss the implications this has for Indigenous research. The chapter presents a strategy for producing new readers and writers, both native and non-native. Whereas the language revitalisation process of the last decades has successfully created new speakers in the younger and middle generations, literacy is still lagging behind, and thus we prioritise strengthening literacy. The strategy, called Čyeti čälled, is a set of actions taken to encourage people to write, creating new domains for writing and supporting people in their writing processes. We argue that in order to succeed, revitalisation needs a pluralistic approach, including the involvement of all generations and the inclusion of both spoken and written language. Our point of view comes from within the AS community and language and the way we approach the language is by insisting that our revitalisation approach actually works and does not merely pay lip service to the revitalisation goal. We will describe the measures to recreate the missing writers’ generations and to activate them in their personal and communal writing processes. The paper describes a revitalisation programme, Čyeti čälled anarâškielân , initiated as a cooperation between Anarâškielâ servi (The Aanaar Saami Association)1 and the research group Giellatekno at The Arctic University of Norway (UiT). The programme creates new writing domains and strengthens existing ones.