Lapland does not denote a sovereign state, but the settlement area of an ethnic minority (the Sami), which mainly extends over the northern areas of the countries Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia extends.
Anyone who would like to deal more closely with the topic of territorial delimitation in the Far North will inevitably refer to the terms Arctic, Lapland, Sapmi and North calotte that cannot be used synonymously and can therefore easily lead to confusion.
Lapland includes in the narrow sensene just that Swedish landscape (landskap) Lapland and Finland's northernmost province Lapland (Lapin lääni) .The Norwegian only consider these two provinces to be Lapland, for them Russian Kola Peninsula it is also not common to use the term Lapland.
In contrast, there is the actual settlement area of the Sami, the Lappish aborigines, namely Sápmiwhich, according to the Sami people, extends far beyond the historical Swedish province of Lapland. Even if the Sami were pushed further north over the centuries, Sápmi extends today from the Kola Peninsula in Russia to Idre in the (central) Swedish province of Dalarna and Engerdal in the Norwegian administrative district of Hedmark.
The North calotte in turn denotes the northernmost region of the Scandinavian peninsula around the Arctic Circle and the area north of it. The term is widely used in Norwegian and Swedish.
The area of Arctic on the other hand, it is defined using climatic criteria: For example, the tree line or the July isotherm of 10 ° C are decisive for the delimitation from the more southern regions of the world. In earlier times, the Arctic was simply defined as the "region north of the Arctic Circle" (66 ° 33 ‘north latitude).
