Olve Utne (1965–2024) was a Norwegian scholar who specialized in Jewish history and culture, Sámi history and culture, music, linguistics, and traditional Norwegian wooden boats. He had a crypto-Jewish Sefaradi background and was particularly interested in exploring, practicing and promoting the Western Sephardic tradition. He also had special interests in genealogy, place names in Norway, and Norwegian dialects. Olve was proficient in a number of languages. Olve had a Cand. Philol. Degree in musicology from the University of Oslo (UiO). In addition to music, he had courses in lexicography from the UiO and linguistics and phonetics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. He was a visiting student at the historical instrument at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels in the academic year 1997-1998 as a Flemish state scholarship holder. He participated in the class for Pite Sámi field work at the winter school for Saami Language Documentation and Revitalisation in Bodø, Norway in March 2010. Olve worked as a senior advisor at the Norwegian Local History Institute where he focused on the Lokalhistoriewiki.no project. He also worked at the Sállto Pite Sámi center. Olve created BidumBágo, a dictionary app for Pite Sámi with translations to and from Norwegian Bokmål, Nynorsk, Swedish, English, and German. In 2004 he was central in starting up the Nynorsk Wikipedia. Olve ran the websites Alnakka.net and Esnoga.no. In addition to his online work, Olve compiled a Friday night siddur, a birkon, a haggadah and a Yiddish-Norwegian dictionary. He also translated some children’s books into Pite Sámi, contributed to the translation of the Hobbit into Sámi languages, and translated the Yiddish for the Beforeigners TV series.
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