Sami

or Saa·mi (sä'-)
n., pl., Sami, or -mis, or Saami, or -mis. In both senses also called Lapp.

1. A member of a people of nomadic herding tradition inhabiting Lapland.
2. Any of the Finnic languages of the Sami.

[Sami, from earlier Sabme, probably akin to Finnish Suomi, Finn, Finnish.]

Sami

For more information on Sami, visit Britannica.com.

Socially acceptable monitoring instrument. A small heart-rate counting apparatus used to estimate energy expenditure.

(b Istanbul, 13 March 1838; d Istanbul, 1 July 1912). Ottoman calligrapher. He was the son of Mahmud Efendi, the head of the quilt-makers guild. Sami learnt ta`liq script from the calligraphers Kibriszade Ismail Hakki Efendi and Ali Haydar Bey (1802-70) and thuluth script from Bosnak Osman Efendi. He was also inspired by the work of MUSTAFA RAQIM. Sami's fine inscriptions and calligraphic compositions adorn several mosques and fountains in Istanbul. He trained such calligraphers as NECMEDDIN OKYAY and Ahmed Kamil Akdik (1861-1941) and was buried in the cemetery of the Fatih Mosque, Istanbul.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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(Saami) [CP]

Indigenous communities traditionally practising reindeer pastoralism in northern Scandinavia, north Russia, and Greenland. Formerly known by the general name of Lapps.

The fifty- to eighty thousand Sami (Lapps) live mostly in northern Norway and Sweden, some in Finland, and only about 3 percent (1,600) in the Kola peninsula of the Russian Federation. They represent less than 0.2 percent of the Murmansk oblast population. They reached the Gulf of Bothnia around 1300. Sami and Finnic languages are not mutually intelligible, having split some three thousand years ago. Three to ten Sami languages are distinguished, and the standard literary Sami in the Nordic countries is difficult to understand for the Kola (Kild) Sami, who are also unfamiliar with its Latin script. The reputed Asian features are actually encountered in only 25 percent of the Sami population.

Inhabiting most of present Finland and Karelia one thousand years ago, the Sami were pushed toward the Arctic Ocean by Scandinavian, Finnish, Russian, and Karelian booty seekers. Those in the west were forced to adopt Catholicism and later Lutheranism. Greek Orthodoxy was imposed on the Kola Samis in the early 1500s, after they were subjected by Novgorod around 1300. The first western Sami book was printed in 1619, and the Bible in 1811, while the first Kola Sami book appeared in 1878.

Reindeer herding remains a major occupation. The Soviet Russian authorities annihilated the traditional Kola Sami settlements in the 1930s, relocating them repeatedly to ever larger state or collective farms, where overgrazing severely reduced the number of reindeer. By now Lujaur (Lovozero in Russian) in central Kola remains the only partly Sami district. In 1937 Moscow ordered all Sami publications destroyed. Ten years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sami became again an optional subject in Lujaur schools, and some basic texts were published. A Kola Sami association was formed in 1989 and later joined the worldwide Sami Council.

Bibliography

Beach, Hugh. (1994). "The Sami of Lapland." In Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development, ed. Minority Rights Group. London: Minority Rights Publications.

Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.

—REIN TAAGEPERA