Paper short abstract:

Konrad Nielsen’s Lappisk ordbok was produced during a period of intense cultural exchange between Sámi reindeer herding communities and Finnish-speaking settlers. Comparing the dictionary’s material with accounts by Johan Turi transforms the dictionary into a portrait of exchange and hybridity.

Paper long abstract:

Konrad Nielsen’s 3-volume Lappisk ordbok-Lapp Dictionary came to press in the early 1930s, but was based on lexicographic fieldwork from the period 1906-11, i.e., precisely the same period in which the great Sámi author and self-taught ethnographer Johan Turi was preparing the writings that would become his three books Muitalus Sámiid birra (1910, An Account of the Sámi), Sámi deavsttat (1918-19 Sámi Texts), and Duoddaris/Mátkemuitalusat (1931, Travel Accounts). Nielsen was first and foremost a phonologist, and early plans for the dictionary focused particularly on the phonetics of three different dialects of North Sámi in the district of Finnmark, Norway. The lexemes included in the dictionary, however, often contain fascinating details of folklore and expressive culture of the time. They also frequently reflect a period in which cultural contacts between speakers of North Sámi and Finnish-speaking settlers were particularly abundant, in terms of economic relations, religious interactions, and intermarriage. By comparing lexical entries in Lappisk ordbok with accounts of folklore—and especially dealings with the supernatural—as detailed in Turi’s works, it becomes possible to see Nielsen’s dictionary as a glimpse into processes of cultural hybridity and exchange going on in northern Sápmi during the opening decades of the twentieth century. While the organizations responsible for the financing and publication of the dictionary may have imagined it as capturing a documentary image of a static Indigenous culture, the dictionary as completed provides evidence for understanding Sámi culture in a period of dynamic interaction with neighboring settler populations.