Beritt-Ellen Juuso, Associate Professor at the Saami University College in Kautokeino (Norway) gave the guest lecture within the Erasmus+ BIP: “Knowledge from the Arctic in the past and present - collecting and (co)-constructing cultural continuity and change” at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) on 24 June 2025.
The Sámi languages are the languages of the only Indigenous people within the European Union. North Sámi is the most widely spoken Sámi language and is used as a language of instruction in certain areas of Finland and Norway. The language is semi-agglutinative and has a relatively transparent orthography, but it also includes special phonemes and characters that influence how reading and writing are learned.
This presentation explores the development of technical reading skills among North Sámi-speaking children in early primary education across two different national contexts. Findings from my doctoral research (Juuso 2024) show that mastery of letter–sound correspondence is a key skill when learning to read in a transparent language, and that the linguistic features of Sámi require pedagogical approaches that are linguistically responsible.
The presentation also introduces the newly launched Lohkanlihkku cross-border collaboration project, which enables a postdoctoral research project on reading and writing acquisition in Sámi-medium education. The aim is to deepen our understanding of how learning can be supported in multilingual environments where a minority language is at the heart of instruction.
