Plans for a new municipal kindergarten in Porsanger, Norway, reveal intent to use a fence to divide children by what language they speak. Initiated to protect minority languages, local politicians have spoken out against the idea.
In Norway, plans for a municipal kindergarten to ensure that children who speak certain languages will retain their fluency sparks debate. It is going to employ fences, preventing kids with different mother tongues from interacting with each other, according to NRK.
The languages in question are Norwegian, Sami and Kven — the latter two are considered minority languages in the country.
The kindergarten is located in the 4–000 people municipality of Porsanger in the county of Finnmark, one of the northernmost areas of the country.
The initiative to build a municipal kindergarten open to all three cultures came in large part from the left-leaning Porsanger Labor Party. Now that the plan for the kindergarten is known, Mona Skanke, a member of the party and Porsanger mayor from 2007 to 2011, has spoken against it.
Also the director of a private kindergarten in Porsanger welcoming all three cultures, Skanke suggested that all children should be able to know each other inside a nursery. Despite the initiative to protect the Sami and Kven languages, Skanke cannot support the project for the kindergarten.
Populations like the Kven emigrated to northern Norway and have their own culture and language. The Sami population is more extended across Scandinavia, but still speaks a minority language in Norway. Norwegian law has stated that these two languages, as well as other minority languages, are of equal value to Norwegian since 2021.
In Norway, children attend kindergartens, or Barnehage in Norwegian, usually from the age of one until they go to primary school at 6.
The conservative mayor of Porsanger, Jo Inge Hesjevik, has decided he would not support the construction of the kindergarten, however, not for ethical reasons.
He said that the municipality cannot afford the building, and there is not an urgent need for it anyway.
According to him, the private trilingual daycare, Bærtua kindergarten, is already sufficient. He suggested that Sami-exclusive nurseries should be built in Sami municipalities instead of building a joint nursery.
Government data shows that Bærtua kindergarten operates with one employee for every five children at the nursery. It is slightly above the ratio of the whole municipality: One employee for every 4.8 children. Bærtua kindergarten also has around ten kids for every instructor. By contrast, one of the Sami exclusive Barnehage in the municipality, has 37.5 students for every instructor.
The Council of Europe, a European inter-governmental human rights organization, stated in February 2022 that “the authorities should monitor the demand for teaching of Sámi languages at each level of education, from kindergarten to higher education.” They found that the state of the Sami and Kven languages was in danger of being extinguished, partly due to the lack of teaching tools to retain these languages.
Kristine Bentzen, linguist at the University of Tromsø, told NRK that separating kids by language is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, she said that Norwegian seems to win when it coexists with minority languages. On the other, separating kids by language may stigmatize minority languages like Sami and Kven.
