Wants Saami names on Arctic oil fields
Future oil and gas fields in the High North should get Saami names the Norwegian Saami Parliament says.
“If oil and gas fields in the north can have Norwegian and even Hebrew names, then it should be possible to give them Saami names as well”, says Vice President in the Norwegian Saami Parliament Laila Susanne Vars, to NRK.
Saami and Norwegian are equal languages in Norway, but the oil and gas fields outside the coast of Finnmark, traditional area for the Saami in Norway, are given Norwegian names like Snøhvit (Snow White) , Skrugard (pressure ridge in an ice pack) and Havis (sea ice). One oil field in the Barents Sea has even got a Hebrew name – Goliat.
The Snøhvit field could have been called Snøfrid instead, Vars suggests. Snøfrid Svåsedotter was the wife of King Harald Sigurdsson and of Saami birth.
There are today nine Saami languages spoken in a region stretching over the four countries Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, reaching from the southern part of central Scandinavia in the southwest to the tip of the Kola Peninsula in the east. Sami is an official language of several municipalities in Northern Norway.
