Aleksandra Andreevna Antonova was a Russian, Kildin Sámi teacher, writer, poet and translator. Antonova, who was an active Kildin Sámi language practitioner, participated in the work of preparing the official Kildin Sámi written language, which has been used since the 1980s. She was the author of several Kildin Sámi textbooks and fiction books in Kildin Sámi and Russian. In 2012, she was awarded the Gollegiella Prize together with Nina Afanasyeva.
Biography
Aleksandra Andreevna Antonova was born in the Kola town of Teriberka in Murmansk Oblast, May 5, 1932. In 1956, she graduated as a teacher in Russian and literature at the State Educational Herzen Institute in Leningrad. After completing her education, Antonova returned to the Kola Peninsula and worked as a teacher at the boarding school in Lovozero from 1956 until retirement. In 1976, a working group for planning the Sami language was established within the education section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the Murman area. Under the guidance of the educator and linguistRimma Kuruch, the Sami-speaking teacher, Antonova, and the pedagogue, Boris Gluhov from Murmansk, began to prepare a new orthography and new teaching material for the Kola-Sami. Together with linguists from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Antonova and her colleagues revised the orthography, which has not been used since 1937, and developed a new scriptural standard. In 1979, this new Cyrillic orthography was first presented and used in experimental language courses. She then began using the new language norm in her Kildin Sámi teaching for pupils at the boarding school and began writing the first Kildin Sámi textbook that came out in 1982. In 1985, the working group in Murmansk, which had grown with several new Sami employees, published a comprehensive Kildin Sámi-Russian dictionary. The authors of the dictionary were Antonova, Nina Afanasyeva, and several others. Georgij K. Kert's Kildin Sámi-Russian-Kildin Sámi dictionary from 1986 was developed with the assistance of Antonova as a native speaker consultant. From 1993–2007, Antonova worked as editor and radio speaker for the Sami radio broadcasts by the municipal radio in Lovozero. She also gave a radio course in Kildin Sámi. In addition to her work as a teacher and language activist, Antonova was also a prolific writer who wrote several collections of poems for children and adults in both Kildin Sámi and Russian. She also translated literature from Kildin Sámi to Russian, and from Russian to Kildin Sámi. Antonova's best-known translation is Astrid Lindgren's three books about Pippi Longstocking, which came out in a collections in Kildin Sámi in 2013. In addition to fiction, she also translated church literature. Antonova also worked as a proofreader and translator for source texts and as an informant for language documentation projects. Antonova died October 8, 2014 in Lovozero.
