1. The question
Norway is the standing counterexample in debates about small-language scholarship. It built a national publication indicator with tiered channel lists that deliberately count Norwegian-language outlets, on the reasoning that domestically relevant research published domestically is a public good that pure metrics would destroy. (cite index=”82-1″>Universities Norway co-founded the 2019 Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication</cite>, and (cite index=”83-1″>the Initiative’s recommendations call for protecting national publishing infrastructures and ensuring that metrics-based systems count publications in all languages.</cite> Flanders copied the model. It works.
The question this paper asks is whether that protection is linguistic or national in its underlying logic. If linguistic, it should extend to any small language inside the Norwegian system on the same reasoning that justifies it for Norwegian. If national, it should defend the state language against English and treat a stateless language inside the state as an afterthought.
The answer turns out to be neither cleanly. Norway’s protection is stratified across four distinct layers, and Sámi is fully included at one, partially included at one, excluded by omission at one, and excluded by a technical standard no Norwegian body controls at the fourth. The pattern is not hypocrisy. It is what happens when an instrument designed for one language is extended to another by analogy rather than rebuilt for it.
2. The legal baseline
The formal position is strong and worth stating precisely, because the gap between it and the instrumental position is the paper’s subject.
(cite index=”128-1″>The Language Act of 2021 declares Sámi languages to be indigenous languages of Norway, of equal value to Norwegian, with equal standing under Chapter 3 of the Sámi Act. Kven, Romani, and Romanes are named national minority languages equal in value to Norwegian, and Norwegian sign language likewise.</cite>
The qualification matters. (cite index=”127-1″>Chapter 1, section 5 of the Sámi Act states that Sámi and Norwegian are of equal status, equal as stated in the policies of Chapter 3, which means they are equal only within the administrative areas designated for the Sámi language.</cite> (cite index=”133-1″>Thirteen municipalities constitute that administrative area: four for Southern Sámi, one for Lule Sámi, and the remainder for Northern Sámi.</cite>
So the baseline is equality of status, delivered inside a territorial boundary. Hold that shape in mind. The scholarly case reproduces it with a procedural boundary substituted for the territorial one.
Scale sets the outer limit on everything that follows. (cite index=”117-1″>Northern Sámi has roughly 25,700 speakers, Lule Sámi around 2,000, and Southern Sámi around 600</cite>, with (cite index=”113-1″>Sámi languages spoken by somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.</cite> No instrument can conjure a peer pool that does not exist. The question is whether the instruments deliver what the population could in principle sustain.
3. Layer one: counting. Full inclusion, at the top rank.
This is where my prediction failed, and it failed decisively.
(cite index=”109-1″>Sámi dieđalaš áigečála, founded in 1994 and publishing scientific articles, book reviews, lectures, and academic histories in Sámi languages, has been classified since 2009 as a Level 2 journal in the Norwegian Scientific Index, the system’s highest rating.</cite> (cite index=”107-1″>The Sámi University of Applied Sciences describes it as the only purely Sámi-language scientific journal in the world, approved in Norway at level 2.</cite> (cite index=”117-1″>It also holds level 1 in the Finnish Publication Forum.</cite>
The significance of level 2 is easy to understate from outside the Norwegian system. Level 2 is a rationed category by design; only a minority of channels in any field can occupy it, precisely so that the rating carries information. Assigning it to a journal whose maximum possible readership is a few tens of thousands of people worldwide is not a gesture. It is the strongest signal the register is capable of sending, and it places a Sámi-language article on the same footing as one in a leading international English-language journal for the purposes of institutional funding and individual career credit.
Whatever else is true, Norway did not build a counting instrument that quietly excludes its indigenous languages. It built one that ranks a Sámi-only channel at the ceiling.
4. Layer two: funding. Exclusion by omission.
Here the picture reverses, and the mechanism is worth examining closely because it is the most transferable finding in the paper.
(cite index=”117-1″>The Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills invited open-access humanities and social science journals publishing in Norwegian to apply for support covering 2024 to 2026. Journals publishing in Swedish and Danish were eligible. The criteria said nothing about minority languages. Eligibility for the Sámi-language journal became clear only after the application process had run, and at the time of writing it sat on a waiting list.</cite>
Note what happened. Nobody decided to exclude Sámi. The people drafting the call were thinking in the category “languages other than English,” and that category, in a Nordic ministry, resolves without conscious effort to “Nordic national languages.” Danish and Swedish were named because they are national languages of neighbouring states. Sámi was not named because it is nobody’s national language, and the drafters did not notice the gap because the frame they were working in has no slot for a language without a state.
The pattern is not Norwegian. (cite index=”117-1″>Sweden funds Swedish-language journals in health, working life, and welfare. Quebec funds French-language journals in society and culture. Spain funds journals in Spanish and its other official languages, but not in the minority languages it has undertaken to protect under the European Charter.</cite> Four jurisdictions, four funding instruments, the same categorical blind spot.
This is the finding that generalizes. Counting rules are written once and can be amended by adding a channel to a register, which costs nothing and requires only that someone submit the journal. Funding calls are written repeatedly, by different officials, each time reproducing whatever tacit category the drafter carries. The cheap layer stays inclusive. The expensive layer reverts to the default with every funding cycle.
5. Layer three: infrastructure. Exclusion by standard.
The third failure is the one no Norwegian authority can fix, which makes it the most instructive.
(cite index=”117-1″>Scholarly publishing infrastructure frequently requires ISO 639-1 two-letter language codes, a standard developed for major languages and first approved in 1967. A three-letter standard covering all known languages has existed since 1998, and best practice is to use two-letter codes where they exist and three-letter codes otherwise, but publishing infrastructure does not always accept three-letter codes.</cite>
Northern Sámi has a two-letter code and can therefore be tagged correctly in Open Journal Systems, exported to Crossref with the right language attribute, and registered in DOAJ as a publication language. (cite index=”117-1″>Southern Sámi and Lule Sámi have no two-letter code. Articles in those languages cannot be identified correctly on the publishing platform or in exported metadata, and the journal cannot declare that it publishes in them in DOAJ or other indexes, leaving those articles effectively invisible even to the small audience that could read them.</cite>
Reflect on the structure of that failure. Norway has assigned Southern Sámi co-official status in four municipalities, funds its teaching, and counts scholarship written in it at the top rank of the national register. And an article in Southern Sámi published under all of that protection cannot be labelled as being in Southern Sámi, because a standard set by an international body in 1967 did not anticipate it. National protection reaches its limit at the point where the relevant infrastructure is transnational and controlled by nobody the Sámediggi or the Storting can lobby.
6. Layer four: terminology and editorial labour. Unrecognized cost.
(cite index=”117-1″>The journal’s editorial team works with authors, language consultants, and language authorities to train contributors in academic writing in these languages and to develop scientific terminology where none exists. These are considerable additional steps that largely go unrecognized.</cite> (cite index=”117-1″>Minority-language users may themselves need convincing that their language is suitable for scholarly communication, a consequence of historical marginalization, and the language may lack a fully developed academic register.</cite>
No counting rule or funding formula anywhere accounts for this. A Norwegian-language journal receives submissions in a language with two centuries of developed academic prose. A Sámi-language journal must partly manufacture the register it publishes in, at its own cost, as a precondition of existing. Both are then evaluated on output.
This is where the paper connects to the Norwegianization history rather than merely gesturing at it. The absent academic register is not a natural feature of a small language. It is the residue of a policy that removed the language from public and educational life for roughly a century, and the cost of rebuilding it now falls on the institution least able to bear it.
7. Layer five: behaviour. The incentive does not reverse the drift.
The final layer is what researchers actually do, and here the level 2 rating turns out not to be decisive.
(cite index=”114-1″>At the Sámi University of Applied Sciences, English is the most frequently used publication language, followed by the main national languages of Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish, with Sámi third. The single channel carrying the most publications by SUAS staff is the one that accepts only Sámi.</cite>
Both halves of that finding matter. The top-ranked Sámi-only journal is the institution’s single largest outlet, which is the incentive working exactly as designed. And English still leads in aggregate, which is the incentive failing to overcome everything pushing the other way: international collaboration, doctoral training conducted in English, the desire to be read by anyone outside a few thousand people, and the ordinary career logic of a researcher who is also a Sámi speaker and also wants a career.
The honest reading is that the counting instrument slows the drift and does not stop it. That is the same finding the Flemish longitudinal data supports for Dutch, where a protected system nonetheless recorded a steady rise in English across 2000 to 2009. Protection buys time. It does not buy reversal.
8. The framing problem inside the protective instrument itself
The deepest finding is that the international instrument built to defend small languages against English is organized on national lines and therefore reproduces the exclusion one level down.
(cite index=”117-1″>It is not clear how minority languages fit into the Helsinki Initiative, given its focus on national languages and national infrastructure.</cite> The Initiative’s own recommendation language speaks of national journals, national book publishers, and national infrastructure. Universities Norway co-signed it. The category “language other than English” carries an unstated qualifier of “and attached to a state,” and the qualifier does its work silently, exactly as it did in the HK-dir funding call.
The proposed remedy in the literature is Sivertsen’s concept of balanced multilingualism, which asks that all communication purposes and all languages required to serve them be considered together without exclusions or priorities. That is the right target. The finding of this paper is that the existing instruments do not reach it and that the reason is categorical rather than budgetary.
9. The pattern confirmed at national scale
The publication case is a miniature of the finding Norway has already reached about itself.
(cite index=”118-1″>The Commission to Investigate the Norwegianisation Policy and Injustice against the Sámi and Kvens, chaired by Dagfinn Høybråten, delivered its report to the Storting on 1 June 2023.</cite> (cite index=”125-1″>Perhaps its most important finding was the large gap between rights long secured for the Sámi and other minorities in international conventions Norway has adopted and in national law, and the failure to implement them.</cite> (cite index=”122-1″>Minority language education is a legal right, and schools offering it remain hard to find.</cite> (cite index=”120-1″>In November 2024 the Storting issued seventeen resolutions responding to the report, beginning with a formal apology</cite>, and (cite index=”123-1″>nine of those decisions concern preservation and promotion of Sámi and Kven languages, with emphasis on teacher recruitment and municipal funding, while the Standing Committee stressed the need to ensure that existing law is actually implemented.</cite>
Equal status in statute, delivered inside a boundary. That is the Sámi Act’s territorial structure, the education right’s practical structure, and the publication regime’s procedural structure, three times over. The scholarly case is not an anomaly requiring separate explanation. It is the same shape at a scale small enough to examine in full.
10. What this does to the sovereignty-of-assessment argument
The companion paper on Norway and Catalonia argued that defense of a small scholarly language depends on control of research assessment rather than on language policy, and that sub-state polities can capture input levers and rarely output ones. The Sámi case forces a refinement.
Sovereignty over assessment turns out to be necessary and not sufficient, because assessment is not one lever. It is at least four, and they have different costs and different owners.
The counting layer is nearly free once built, is amended by adding an entry to a register, and is therefore the layer where inclusion happens first and most generously. Norway’s performance here is exemplary.
The funding layer is expensive, is re-decided every cycle, and reverts to the drafter’s tacit categories each time. Norway fails here, as do Sweden, Quebec, and Spain.
The infrastructure layer is controlled by nobody at national level, since ISO, Crossref, and DOAJ are transnational. No amount of sovereignty reaches it.
The terminology and register layer is the most expensive of all and appears in no formula anywhere.
Set against Catalonia, the profiles are close to complementary. Catalan is excluded at the counting layer, since a Catalan-language article does not count toward a sexenio; well served at the funding layer, since the Generalitat funds Catalan-language publication directly; and fully served at the infrastructure layer, since Catalan has a two-letter code and a mature digital toolchain. Sámi has the counting layer and lacks the other two. Neither holds all four, and neither lacks all four. A framework that scores language protection as a single variable will misread both.
The Sámediggi’s position is the third case the original argument needed. (cite index=”135-1″>It has held responsibility for development of the Sámi language in Norway, including allocation of funds to Sámi language municipalities and counties, since 1992.</cite> That is real competence, and it is competence over language policy, not research policy. The Sámediggi does not write the counting rules, the funding calls, or the ISO standards. So it sits between Norway, which holds the whole apparatus, and Catalonia, which holds none of the output levers: a body with genuine language authority and no research-policy authority, producing protection that is legally strong, instrumentally patchy, and dependent on the goodwill of officials in bodies it does not control.
11. Assessment
Norway’s protection of Sámi-language scholarship is better than the sceptical prediction and worse than the legal baseline promises. The counting instrument is generous to the point of being a model other states should copy. The funding instrument, the technical infrastructure, and the register-building burden are where the protection thins, and they thin in ascending order of cost and descending order of visibility.
The generalizable claim is that language protection fails at the layers nobody is looking at, and that the layers nobody is looking at are reliably the expensive ones. A state can be genuinely committed, legislate equality of value, rank a minority-language journal at the top of its register, and still leave that journal on a funding waiting list and unable to label half its articles, because commitment operates through instruments and instruments carry categories their drafters never examine.
For a country that has just spent five years and seven hundred pages establishing that its central failure toward the Sámi is the distance between rights granted and rights delivered, this is a small case with an uncomfortable fit. It is also a tractable one. Naming minority languages explicitly in the next funding call costs nothing, and would close the largest of the three gaps this paper identifies before the next cycle reproduces it.
