Our Story
Giellakafea grew out of an online language café for North Sámi, an endangered language of the indigenous Sámi people. The language café was founded by Anne-Laila Blind Petersdotter in 2023, a Sámi journalist from Umeå. She has worked mainly for Sameradion (Sámi radio), which is a part of Sveriges Radio (Sweden’s national radio). Language revitalization is of great importance to her, so she created an online language café in 2023, wanting to create more opportunities for people to take back their mother tongue in an easy and accessible way.
Magdalena Parks joined the language café in the beginning of 2025. She is a software engineer from New York State. She moved to Sweden in 2015 for Uppsala University’s Masters program in Computational Linguistics, and then continued her career in Stockholm as a software engineer, working primarily with startups for about 10 years. Her great great grandmother was Sámi, so after moving to Sweden she decided to learn a little more about her Sámi heritage, joining Stockholm’s Sámi Association, where she eventually took her first North Sámi beginner course in 2024. She was looking for a way to continue practicing after the course, and joined the language café a few months later.
While the language café was an excellent resource, Magdalena quickly noticed a lack of digital tools and resources for keeping up with North Sámi outside of the language café and decided to build the kind of tools she wished she could have had starting out. By the end of 2025, she began building the first prototype for an app, and in early 2026 asked Anne-Laila if she would be interested in co-founding a startup together for endangered language revitalization, and Giellakafea began.