Israel Ruong was a Swedish-Sámi

SAMI

SAMI is a Microsoft accessibility initiative released in 1998. The structured markup language is designed to simplify creating captions for media playback on a PC, i.e. not for broadcast purposes....

 linguist, politician and professor of Sámi languages

Sami languages

Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...

 and culture at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Israel Ruong spoke Pite Sámi

Pite Sami

Pite Sami, also known as Arjeplog Sami, is a Sami language traditionally spoken in Sweden and Norway. It is a critically endangered language that has only about 25–50 native speakers left and is now only spoken on the Swedish side of the border along the Pite River in the north of Arjeplog...

 as his mother tongue. His parents were catechists, who lived on the shores of Lake Labbas

Labbas

Labbas is a lake in the Swedish municipality of Arjeplog near the village of Sundnäs close to the Arctic Circle. The lake stands at 488 meters above sea level. Locally, the lake is known for being a good fishing ground for char....

 in the Sámi village of Harrok. His parents and a number of his siblings succumbed to the Spanish flu

Spanish flu

The 1918 flu pandemic was an influenza pandemic, and the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus . It was an unusually severe and deadly pandemic that spread across the world. Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify the geographic origin...

 that rampaged through Arjeplog in 1920. His upbringing in Harrok is described in detail in his article "Harrok-ett samiskt nybygge i Pite Lappmark", which was published in the Festschrift

Festschrift

In academia, a Festschrift , is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory writing...

 for Asbjørn Nesheim

Asbjørn Nesheim

Asbjørn Nesheim was a Norwegian linguist and curator known for his research on the Sámi languages and cultural history, particularly for his collaboration with Konrad Nielsen on volumes four and five of Nielsen's Lapp Dictionary...

 entitled Kultur på karrig jord : festskrift til Asbjørn Nesheim.
He received his training to become a teacher in Luleå

Luleå

- Transportation :Local buses are run by .A passenger train service is available from Luleå Centralstation on Sweden's national SJ railway service northbound to Narvik on the Norwegian coast, or southbound to Stockholm. See Rail transport in Sweden....

, after which he went on to worked as a teacher in the nomad school in Jukkasjärvi

Jukkasjärvi

Jukkasjärvi is a locality situated in Kiruna Municipality, Norrbotten County, Sweden with 519 inhabitants in 2005. It is situated at 321 meters elevation....

. In 1943, he defended his dissertation entitled Lappische Verbalableitung dargestellt auf Grundlage des Pitelappischen.
From 1947 to 1967, he served as the inspector for nomad schools in Sweden.
Ruong served as associate professor in Sámi languages and Ethnology at the University of Uppsala from 1949 to 1969, at which point in time he was promoted to professor. As a linguist, Ruong worked on various aspects of the Sámi languages, especially on their morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

.
Together with Knut Bergsland

Knut Bergsland

Knut Bergsland was a Norwegian linguist. Working as a professor at the University of Oslo from 1947 to 1981, he did groundbreaking research in Uralic and Eskimo–Aleut languages.-Career:...

, he created the Bergsland-Ruong orthography

Northern Sami orthography

The orthography used to write Northern Sami has experienced numerous changes over the several hundred years it has existed. For most of this time, Norway, Sweden and Finland — the three countries where Northern Sámi is spoken — each had their own orthography for teaching the Sámi within...

 for Northern Sámi

Northern Sami

Northern or North Sami is the most widely spoken of all Sami languages. The speaking area of Northern Sami covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland...

 in 1948. Thanks to the new orthography, Ruong was able to publish schoolbooks in Sámi. In 1970, he published a grammar book in Northern Sámi called Min sámegiella.

Ruong was also involved in Sámi politics and was one of the founding members of the Svenska samers riksförbund (SSR) in 1950. He served as head of the SSR from 1959 to 1967.
In addition to his political and educational work, Ruong also served as the editor-in-chief of the Sámi newspaper Samefolket from 1960 to 1973.

In 1983, the Israel Ruong Scholarship was established by the Nordic Sami Institute

Nordic Sámi Institute

The Nordic Sami Institute is a research institution located at Guovdageaidnu in Norway. It is affiliated to Sámi University College. The mission of the institute is to strengthen and develop Sami languages, culture and social life...

. It is awarded yearly to a researcher that works in one or more of the fields that Ruong himself was interested in.

Brief bibliography

• Studier i lapsk kultur i Pite lappmark och angränsande områden (1944)
• Formlära (1957)
• Niilas ja su sii'da (1965)
• Dovdagat ja bargot (1967)
• Samerna (1969)
• Min sámegiella (1970)
• Index till samefolkets egen tidning-Samefolket 1918-1973 (1985)