Leif Rantala
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Leif Rantala (26 December 1947,
Liljendal Liljendal is a former municipality of Finland. It is located in the province of Southern Finland and was part of the Eastern Uusimaa region. The municipality had a population of 1,472 (31 December 2009) and covered an area of of which is water ...
– 8 January 2015,
Rovaniemi Rovaniemi ( , ; ; ; ) is a city in Finland and the regional capital of Lapland (Finland), Lapland. It is located near the Arctic Circle in the northern interior of the country. The population of Rovaniemi is approximately , while the Rovaniemi su ...
) was a Finnish-Swedish
linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, and a specialist of
Sami languages Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ...
, cultures of history, especially of the
Kola Peninsula The Kola Peninsula (; ) is a peninsula in the extreme northwest of Russia, and one of the largest peninsulas of Europe. Constituting the bulk of the territory of Murmansk Oblast, it lies almost completely inside the Arctic Circle and is border ...
. Valentina Sovkina characterized Rantala in Facebook with the following words: “He left a large, radiant footprint in the lives of the Sami people, with his interest in and knowledge of the Skolt Sami and the Sami of the Kola Peninsula.”


Activities in science and society

Rantala graduated from
Helsinki University The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Tsar Al ...
with a MA degree in
Finno-Ugric languages Finno-Ugric () is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th centur ...
in 1975. His thesis dealt with the Saami place names in
Polmak , , or is a village in Tana Municipality in Finnmark county in Norway. The village is located on the south bank of the river Tana, just east of the border with Finland (and the northernmost point of Finland). The village is the site of the ...
. He worked at the
University of Lapland The University of Lapland ( Finnish: ''Lapin yliopisto'', Swedish: ''Lapplands universitet'') is a public university in Rovaniemi, Finland. It was established in 1979 and is the northernmost university in the European Union. Around 4,000 und ...
in Rovaniemi, mainly as a teacher of the Northern Saami language. He was an expert of the Saami peoples and cultures of Pechenga and the Kola Peninsula. He collected a sizable collection of ethnographic materials from the Saami of Russia. Rantala often had to work as a translator, when the civil servants in Finnish Lapland did not know Saami. “I have sometimes had to translate texts, when people have complained about the non-existent command of Saami of e.g. the police. How many Finnish civil servants have taken the trouble to learn Saami? I don’t think there are too many of them.” According to Rantala, society should use various perks to motivate civil servants to learn Saami.


Works

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Translations

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Work edited

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rantala, Leif Finnish Finno-Ugrists Linguists of Sámi 1947 births 2015 deaths Academic staff of the University of Lapland University of Helsinki alumni People from Loviisa Finnish translators 20th-century Finnish people 20th-century linguists 20th-century translators 21st-century Finnish people 21st-century linguists 21st-century translators Swedish-speaking Finns