ABSTRACT
The Saami are the indigenous people of northernmost Europe. They are spread across four nations: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The only indigenous Saami musical genre is a style of vocalizing known as joik, from the Saami verb joigat 'to produce musical sound' and an anglicization of the Swedish jojk. Joiking, and even listening to joiks, have long been a means of demarcating ethnicity. Numerous dialects of joik correspond roughly to dialectal distinctions in the Saami language. It is expedient to divide these subgenres into two gross categories: North and South Saami, representative of a basic cultural bifurcation that includes language and handcrafts in its purview. Joiking typically involves much use of the throat and nasopharynx, contributing to what may be described as a harsh or nasal vocal timbre; these qualities are accentuated if the joiker does so loudly, as often happens.
