This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. She’s a native speaker of Northern Sámi and Finnish and fluent speaker of Swedish. She can read German and uses English mainly for academic publishing purposes. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about multilingual literacy.

But first, some announcements! We’ve commissioned a jazzed up version of the Lingthusiasm logo with fun little doodles in the classic shape of the Lingthusiasm squiggle adorning your podcast reader right now – now filled in with some linguistics and Lingthusiasm references in little, tiny doodles. See how many you can spot! We’re gonna be sending out a sticker with this new design to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-thusiast level and higher as of July 1, 2025. If you wanna get this sticker that can adore your laptop, water bottle, and help maybe connect you to other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm. If you just wanna see a version of this sticker and see how many of the little doodles you can identify, you can go to lingthusiasm.com or @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. We’ll be posting about it a lot. Our artist, Lucy Maddox, did a really great job, and we’re so excited to share this design with you.

Our most recent bonus episode was about the linguistics of kissing from the physical articulation of kisses – which involves the mouth, much like many linguistic things – as well as the social significance of kissing in various ways, various times to various classes of people, to writing kisses as Xs and with emoji. All of that and 98 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm help keep the show going.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Hanna-Máret, welcome to the show.

Hanna-Máret: Hi!

Gretchen: It’s so nice to have you here.

Hanna-Máret: It’s really good to be here.

Gretchen: We’re gonna get into more of your work later, but let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get interested in linguistics?”

Hanna-Máret: I grew up in a multilingual region in northern Finland that’s as far north in Europe as one can get. In my childhood, most people living there, they knew my Indigenous heritage language (that’s Northern Sámi), and they also spoke either Finnish or Norwegian or both. We also learned a lot of English in school and through TV. My home was also right at the border of Finland and Norway. There was only a river marking the state border. Some languages float quite freely in that region. For many people, knowing languages was quite natural. Most people didn’t think so much about the languages, but my father was always talking about some linguistic traits or challenges or other matters. He was a special teacher and had always had an interest in languages and for linguistics. His language enthusiasm spread into my life very early. He also read to me and encouraged me to read a lot in different languages, and then we used to talk about the literature afterwards. I was also really fascinated by the language knowledge and cultural knowledge that my Sámi relatives had, although most of them were not academics. The Sámi speakers in the generation before mine were actually the last ones to grow up speaking mainly Sámi. Their language was so beautiful and so effortless. I decided quite young that I would pursue a career working with my heritage language and do my best to support its survival.

Gretchen: That led you into linguistics.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, but first I considered a career as a translator or interpreter. I actually got a basic training in that also. But I worked as an interpreter mostly just to make some money so that I could continue studying at the university. I studied Sámi, Finnish, linguistics, pedagogy, and I got a bachelor’s degree in Sámi language. Some of my professors then encouraged me to reach for the master’s degree and then continue with the PhD.

Gretchen: Did you go right into Sámi language revitalisation work, or were you doing more academic stuff?

Hanna-Máret: Well, my first attempt with the PhD was actually in formal linguistics. I was working on reflexivity and reciprocity in Sámi and this more specifically with Government and Binding Theory, which had, at that time, not yet lost its glory. I actually never finished the thesis. Instead, my teaching responsibilities grew every year, and I started noticing that I was more interested in the use of language than in some isolated syntactic structure. I don’t want anyone to get me wrong here. I’m really grateful for having acquired a base in formal linguistics since it has given me the tools not only to describe my language but also to problematise and solve some issues that our traditional, prescriptive grammars in some languages are not able to explain. It’s just that, at some point, I started thinking more about the work that was needed to keep the language in daily use and not just the structures.

Gretchen: But you have a doctorate now. You went back and did something else?

Hanna-Máret: My second attempt to finish the doctoral degree was, happily, a bit more successful, and I get the chance to gather texts written by multilingual Sámi children in three countries. Me and my colleagues, we used something that’s called “keystroke logging” to trace the ways our writers express their thoughts and ideas in three languages. I really found that project very inspiring, although it also showed me how challenging it can be to work with schools and pupils. After that PhD, I got a chance to do my postdoctoral studies within applied linguistics and educational sciences.

Gretchen: Three languages – that would be Sámi, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish? That’s four.

Hanna-Máret: I was in three countries. It was the majority language of all the countries. In Finland, Finnish; in Sweden, Swedish; and in Norway Norwegian. All the kids here in Nordic countries also study English, so that was the third language.

Gretchen: Okay. The third language depending on the country they did – yeah. Did you bring all of these different backgrounds together?

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski

When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable written traditions, and engaging with writing as part of teaching these languages to children is important for all of the same reasons as we teach writing in majoritarian languages.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about multilingual literacy with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. We talk about growing up with a mix of Northern Sámi, Finnish, Norwegian, and English, as well as how Hanna-Máret got into linguistics and shifted her interests from more formal to more community-based work, such as “language showers” and the role of play in language learning. We also talk about the long history of literature in Sámi, from joiks written down as early as the 1500s to how people are still joiking today (including on Eurovision), and how teaching kids writing can strengthen oral traditions.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the linguistics of kissing]! We talk about the technical phonetics terms for kissing (bilabial clicks…plus the classic ling student quadrilabial clicks joke) as well as how different cultures taxonomize types of kissing (the Roman osculum/basium/suavium distinction is still pretty useful!). We also talk about how toddlers acquire the “blow a kiss” gesture, how couples time their kisses around their sentences, and many ways of representing kissing in writing, such as xx, xoxo, and emoji.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. If you join before July 1st you’ll get a sticker of a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox! There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

We’re also running a poll for current patreon supports to vote on the final sticker design! This sticker will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. Our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Hanna-Máret Outakoski (university profile)
• ‘Developing Literacy Research in Sápmi’ by Hanna Outakoski
• 'Giellariššu: Indigenous language revitalisation in the city’ by Hanna-Máret Outakoski and Øystein A. Vangsnes (language showers)
• 'An introduction to joik’ by Juhán Niila Stålka
• Wikipedia entry for 'Joik’
• Sami voices / Sáme jiena (for more information on the archiving of joiks)
• 'Developing Literacy Research in Sápmi’ by Hanna Outakoski
• 'Conceptualizing fireside dialogues as gulahallan’ by Hanna-Máret Outakoski
• 'What is indigenous research methodology?’ paper on Relational Accountability by Shawn Wilson
• Northern Oral Language And Writing Through Play
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Connecting with oral culture’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).