Abstract

Towards the new land. Skolt Sami evacuees’ place names in Northeast Aanar (Inari)

My research project Place names of multilingual Aanaar studies how place names reflect cultural and linguistic contacts in Aanar (saSk; Fi. Inari, Sw. Enare). The aim of this paper is to study Skolt Sami naming and place names of north-eastern parts of the municipality in the Čeʹvetjäuʹrr (Fi. Sevettijärvi) and Njauddâm (Fi. Näätämö) areas, where a major part of the Skolt Sami population of Peäccam (Fi. Petsamo, Eng. Pechenga) was resettled after World War II. The most important research question is: did the existing place names and language ecological situation influence the evacuees’ naming? The history of Northeast Aanar is multicultural and multilingual. There are Skolt Sami substrate names from the 19th century, but at the beginning of the 20th century, most of the place names were in Inari Sami, North Sami or Finnish until the evacuees moved in. The results of name pair analysis show that Finnish place names seem to have had most influence on the new Skolt Sami place names. However, the influence seems to be partly indirect: the maps preferring Finnish name variants, Finnish as a lingua franca between speakers of different Sami languages and the rapid change to full Finnish–Skolt Sami bilingualism seem to have had central role. These results challenge the old models created to explain borrowing of place names, and demand new approaches that better take into account the language ecological situation and the language competence of multilingual communities.