The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Lapps

(Laplanders; self-designation, Sameh), a people living on the Kola Peninsula in the RSFSR (approximately 1,900 persons; 1970 census) and in northern Norway (approximately 20,000), Sweden (approximately 7,000), and Finland (approximately 2,000). They speak the Lapp language. The Scandinavian Lapps are Lutherans, and the Kola Lapps were formerly members of the Orthodox Church. The Lapps are the indigenous inhabitants of the northern regions of Karelia, Finland, and Scandinavia; they formerly lived in the more southerly regions as well. The traditional occupations of the Lapps are fishing, hunting, and reindeer breeding. In the USSR, some Lapp kolkhozes breed dairy animals, and others engage in fur farming as well.

REFERENCES

Narody zarubezhnoi Evropy, vol. 2. Moscow, 1965.
Narody Evropeiskoi chasti SSSR, vol. 2. Moscow, 1964.
Charnolusskii, V. V. Materialy po bytu loparei. Leningrad, 1930.
Kharuzin, N. N. Russkie lopari. Moscow, 1890.

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

This Lapp "pillar of the world" was part of an old sacrificial site seen in the 18th century near Porsanger Fjord on what is now the northernmost coast of Norway.

Bear watching: circumpolar stars never stray far, thanks to their celestial herder

Church services are 6:30 Christmas Day, with the Lapps in their most exotic costumes.

(Right) Lapps, not their reindeer, are an endangered species in the modern world.

The suit he will wear later has weaves and embellishments only a Lapp woman can create; high-holiday wear is even more spectacular, his Hat of the Four Winds having sharp corners and multicolored ribbons streaming in the wind.

Lapland; seasons of the sun

That complex had a small hail for the Sami Parliament (Sameting), the democratically elected body (founded in 1989) which looks after Lapp affairs.

PARLIAMENTARY PRESCIENCE

In fact, the Lapps believe the soul is a bird, and in many other traditions the Milky Way is said to be a road for the dead.

Migrating birds and the Milky Way

The Lapps, like the Kurds, are a nation without borders.

Karasjok is the Norwegian capital of the Lapps, north of the top of Sweden, and only a few kilometres west of the Finnish border.

Midnight sun-dance

Its other columns contain also the translations of these glosses into Olonets Karelian (Livviks) and Vepsian (Luudiks), as well as into five Lapp dialects ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), with several words on p.

rich collection of literature and sources on the history of the Uralic (and especially of the Lapp) studies together with the expert advice from LarsGunnar Larsson--to whom the author feels very much indebted!--made it possible to uncover the origin of these materials, and to define their place in the history of scholarship.

A Mezen' Nenets glossary and other linguistic date from Sjogren's papers/[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]