Qualla: Hattfjelldal Municipality

Hattfjelldal Municipality: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beagle84, CC BY-SA 3.0. Fluent speakers of Southern Sami number somewhere around five hundred. Hattfjelldal Municipality has 1,284 residents. Everyone alive who speaks the language easily would not fill this one thinly settled corner of Nordland — and this is one of the places where it is still spoken, taught, argued over and used for ordinary things. Since 2017 Southern Sami has been an official administrative language here alongside Norwegian. Since 2019 the municipality has carried a second official name of its own: Aarborte.

Image: Beagle84 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hattfjelldal Municipality: Aarborte

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zaratystra2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Southern Sami name became co-equal with the Norwegian one by national resolution on 14 June 2019 — Aarborte on its own, Aarborten tjïelte when the word for municipality is attached. That resolution came at the end of a long argument. Until well into the 1700s these valleys we...

Image: Zaratystra2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hattfjelldal Municipality: The Hat-Shaped Mountain

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zaratystra2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Norwegian name is literal to the point of bluntness. A mountain nearby, Hattfjellet, has a flat top and steep sides and looks like a hat; the valley beneath it took the mountain's name; a farm in that valley, recorded as Hatfieldalen in 1723, gave its name to the parish and t...

Image: Zaratystra2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hattfjelldal Municipality: Nine Metres of Water

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benjamin Hell (User:Siebengang), CC BY-SA 3.0. Røssvatnet is the second-largest lake in Norway by surface area, and it is that size because engineers made it so. Before regulation it covered about 190 square kilometres at 374 metres above the sea. The dam first flooded it in 1957, raising the surface nine metres to 383 and th...

Image: Benjamin Hell (User:Siebengang) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hattfjelldal Municipality: Concrete Poured in 1943

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anjar, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hattfjelldal Airfield, ENHT, sits beside the administrative centre with a 715-metre concrete runway at 210 metres elevation. It began in 1933 as a simple landing field. After taking the area in 1940 the Germans expanded it into a proper airfield with a wooden runway, then replace...

Image: Anjar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hattfjelldal Municipality: A Ledger of Small Numbers

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet, CC BY 2.0. At 2,684 square kilometres Hattfjelldal is the twentieth largest of Norway's 357 municipalities and the 315th most populous, which works out at roughly half a person per square kilometre. The population has fallen by more than fourteen per cent in a decade. Nearly a fifth of thos...

Image: NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet | CC BY 2.0