Language, education and national culture in Norway.

In this paper my goal is to explore the relationship between culture and power by historicizing the relationship between Norwegian nationalism and Saami (Lapp) language loss.My aim is to illustrate how the erosion of the Saami language developed not simply as a unilateral result of Norwegian language policies but rather through the transformation of specific local Saami cultural practices by broader socio-political processes linked to nation-building and state-formation. In particular I look at the role played by public schools in the socialization of many indigenous Saami into Norwegian national culture. By looking at the context of public education I argue that we can better understand the cultural mechanisms which promoted the stigmatization of Saami language practices. More generally I hope to demonstrate how cultural analyses of educational systems can help us to understand the marginalization of ethnolinguistic minorities in the modern nation-state. The concept of "language shift" give us a particularly useful lens through which to investigate the cultural manifestations of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]