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  • Sami people 1

    Sami people

    Smi

    Smi flag

    Mari Boine Lars Levi Lstadius Lisa ThomassonHelga Pedersen Rene Zellweger Ole Henrik Magga

    Total population

    163,400 (80,000135,000)

    Regions with significant populations

    Spmi 133,400

    Norway 37,890 [1]

    United States 30,000 [2]

    Sweden 14,600 [3]

    Finland 9,350 [4]

    Russia 1,991 [5]

    Ukraine 136 [6]

    Languages

  • Sami people 2

    Sami languages:Northern Sami, Lule Sami, Pite Sami, Ume Sami, Southern Sami, Inari Sami, Skolt Sami, Kildin Sami, Ter

    SamiAkkala Sami (extinct), Kemi Sami (extinct), Kainuu Sami (extinct)

    Nation State Languages:Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Russian

    Religion

    Lutheranism, Laestadianism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Sami shamanism

    Related ethnic groups

    other Finnic peoples

    The Sami people, also spelled Smi or Saami, are the indigenous people inhabiting the Arctic area of Spmi, whichtoday encompasses parts of far northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border areabetween south and middle Sweden and Norway. The Smi are the only indigenous people of Scandinavia recognizedand protected under the international conventions of indigenous peoples, and hence the northernmost indigenouspeople of Europe.[7] Sami ancestral lands span an area of approximately 388,350km2 (150,000 sq. mi.), which isapproximately the size of Sweden, in the Nordic countries. Their traditional languages are the Sami languages andare classified as a branch of the Uralic language family.Traditionally, the Sami have pursued a variety of livelihoods, including coastal fishing, fur trapping and sheepherding. Their best-known means of livelihood is semi-nomadic reindeer herding. Currently about 10% of the Samiare connected to reindeer herding and 2,800 are actively involved in herding on a full-time basis.[8] For traditional,environmental, cultural and political reasons, reindeer herding is legally reserved only for Sami people in certainregions of the Nordic countries.[9]

    EtymologiesThe Smi are often known in other languages by the exonyms Lap, Lapp, or Laplanders, but many Sami regard theseas pejorative terms.[10][11][12] Variants of the name Lapp were originally used in Sweden and Finland and, throughSwedish, adopted by all major European languages: English: Lapps, German, Dutch: Lappen, Russian: (lopari), Ukrainian: , French: Lapons, Greek: (Lpnes), Italian: Lapponi, Polish: Lapoczycy,Spanish: Lapn, Portuguese: Lapes, Turkish: Lpon.The first known historical mention of the Sami, naming them Fenni, was by Tacitus, about 98CE.[13] Variants ofFinn or Fenni were in wide use in ancient times, judging from the names Fenni and Phinnoi in classical Roman andGreek works. Finn (or variants, such as skridfinn, "striding Finn") was the name originally used by Norse speakers(and their proto-Norse speaking ancestors) to refer to the Sami, as attested in the Icelandic Eddas and Norse sagas(11th to 14th centuries). The etymology is somewhat uncertain, but the consensus seems to be that it is related to OldNorse finna, from proto-Germanic *finthanan ("to find"),[14] the logic being that the Sami, as hunter-gatherers"found" their food, rather than grew it. It has been suggested, however, that it may originally have been a moregeneral term for "northern hunter gatherers", rather than referring exclusively to the Sami, which may explain whytwo Swedish runestones from the 11th century apparently refer to what is now southwestern Finland as Finland.Note that in Finnish, Finns (inhabitants of Finland), do not refer to themselves as Finns. As Old Norse graduallydeveloped into the separate Scandinavian languages, Swedes apparently took to using Finn exclusively to refer toinhabitants of Finland, while Sami came to be called Lapps. In Norway, however, Sami were still called Finns atleast until the modern era (reflected in toponyms like Finnmark, Finnsnes, Finnfjord and Finny) and some NorthernNorwegians will still occasionally use Finn to refer to Sami people, although the Sami themselves now consider thisto be a pejorative term. Finnish immigrants to Northern Norway in the 18th and 19th centuries were referred to as"Kvens" to distinguish them from the Sami "Finns".

  • Sami people 3

    The exact meaning of the term Lapp, and the reasons it came into common usage, are unknown; in modernScandinavian languages, lapp means "a patch of cloth for mending", which may be a description[citation needed] of theclothing, called a gakti, that the Smi wore. Another possible source is the Finnish word lape, which in this casemeans "periphery". It is unknown how the word Lapp came into the Norse language, but one of the first writtenmentions of the term is in the Gesta Danorum by 12th century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, who referred tothe two Lappias, although he still referred to the Sami as (Skrid-)Finns.[15][16] In fact, Saxo never explicitly connectsthe Sami with the "two Laplands". It was popularized and became the standard terminology by the work of JohannesSchefferus, Acta Lapponica (1673), but was also used earlier by Olaus Magnus in his Description of the Northernpeoples (1555). There is another suggestion that it originally meant "wilds".[citation needed]

    In Sweden and Finland, Lapp is common in place names, such as Lappi (Lnsi-Suomen lni) and Lapinlahti(It-Suomen lni) in Finland; and Lapp (Stockholm County), Lappe (Sdermanland) and Lappabo (Smland) inSweden. As already mentioned, Finn is a common element in Norwegian (particularly Northern Norwegian) placenames, whereas Lapp is exceedingly rare.In the North Smi language, lhppon olmmo means a person who is lost (from the verb lhppot, to get lost).

    Homeland of the Smi people

    Smi refer to themselves as Smit (the Smis) or Spmela (of Smikin), the word Smi being inflected into various grammatical forms. Ithas been proposed that Smi (presumably borrowed from theProto-Finnic word), Hme (Finnish for Tavastia) (< Proto-Finnic*m, the second still being found in the archaic derivationHmlinen), and perhaps Suomi (Finnish for Finland) (