Browsing by Subject "Lääʹddjânnam riikksuåvtõs"

It has been more than 30 years since the first language act about the Saami being able to use their own languages with the authorities was passed in Finland. That act and its successor were enacted when public services were provided in person or by telephone and not online. Nowadays, Finland has been moving more and more of its services online and the current government has even stated that it intends to make these digital services the main way public authorities and citizens communicate with each other. Finland is bound by its own legislation and international treaties to make sure that the linguistic rights of the Skolt Saami are upheld the same way they are for other groups by its public bodies and officials. But are these upheld in the government’s online services, such as on the websites of the Finnish Government and its twelve ministries? To determine whether or not Skolt Saami speakers could use their own language in these environments, I examined the hitherto unstudied visibility or invisibility and the presence or absence of the language from the virtual linguistic landscape of these websites. When a language is visible and included in the linguistic landscape, it can elevate the prestige and status of the language in the eyes of the language community and outsiders. If it is only used in a tokenistic fashion, however, without any other concrete actions being taken, this creates expectations that will go unfulfilled. The visibility and presence of a language in the linguistic landscape can indicate that language legislation and policies are being implemented as agreed and work, while its invisibility or absence can indicate they are inadequate. The material for this study was collected by taking screenshots of the websites of the Finnish Government and its twelve ministries from 2004 to 2024. This twenty-year period saw nine different government cabinets in power. In my analysis, I focussed on two main elements that users first see when they visit these websites: 1) the cookie consent banner and 2) the front page of the website. By law, users must be able to understand the banner for them to legally consent to the use of cookies. When the front page works the way it should, it contains information that helps users locate what they are looking for. On the front page, I paid particular attention to 1) what language or languages are used on it as well as where and how they are used, 2) what languages are used in the logos, 3) where the language selector was located and what languages it included, and 4) what languages were used in textual links. The first key finding was that Skolt Saami is not visible or included on the websites of the Finnish Government or ten of its ministries at all. On the front page of two ministries, Skolt Saami was visibly present, albeit in an infinitesimal amount and as truncated information. On the front page of the Ministry of Justice, Skolt Saami has been visible in the ministry logo since 2019, but only on the Northern Saami version of the website. Other than that, the language is visibly absent elsewhere on the front page and on other language versions. The second website, that of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, has added all three Saami languages to the front page of its truncated Northern Saami version of the website. The Skolt Saami portion is limited to two sentences of instructions on how to find material on the website in the language after the same instructions in Northern and Inari Saami. As Skolt Saami is so parsimoniously used on these websites, it is reasonable to conclude that legislation and international treaties have not had much of an impact on the visibility of Skolt Saami or promoted its use in these environments in the last twenty years. A second key finding is that Skolt Saami is used on some of these websites, but it has been concealed behind Northern Saami in various ways, even though these are two different languages. There are no apparent, visual indicators that these texts exist in Skolt Saami, and each language is treated differently depending on the language version and website. The findability of existing material in Skolt Saami is poor due to the invisibility of the language and the inconsistent ways it is in included. My findings show that the non-existent information scent on these sites forces Skolt Saami users to assume or guess that these texts exist in Skolt Saami, to know enough Northern Saami to be able to choose the correct link, and to know to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find them. The same is not required of Finnish, Swedish, and English users of these websites.