Divvun & Giellatekno — Sámi Language Technology Infrastructure

Since 2004 Norway's Divvun and Giellatekno research groups, now at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, have built grammar-based (finite-state transducer/Constraint Grammar) language technology for all eight Sámi languages, funded by the Sámi Parliament (Sametinget) and Norwegian government ministries.

Over two decades the teams built keyboards for all eight Sámi languages across six platforms, spellcheckers, hyphenators, dictionaries, machine translation for several language pairs and speech synthesis for three Sámi languages; Apple added native Sámi keyboard support across its platforms in late 2023.

The project's own retrospective flags a persistent 'last-mile' problem: third-party Sámi keyboard apps are routinely denied hardware-keyboard access on Android/iPadOS, and cloud office suites block integrated spellcheck plugins, so platform-level restrictions — not the underlying language technology — are now the main barrier to full digital inclusion.