In 1752, the 17-year-old Sámi boy Anders Porsanger from Kjelvik in Finnmark arrived in Trondheim to work as a language master at the city's Seminarium Lapponicum. This was an institution that trained missionaries who could preach in Sámi languages and offer Sámi people education in their own mother tongue. They also produced textbooks and conducted research on the Sámi languages. 

During the years he worked for the seminary, Anders became the first Sámi person in the country to receive a priest's education. He began working on translating the Bible into Northern Sámi, put significant effort into creating textbooks in the Northern Sámi language, and became a prominent language researcher of his time. Almost none of the works he contributed to were published under his own name. 

To finance his position at the seminary, he was made a priest at Hospitalskirka, where he worked for six years. Due to power struggles over positions, he came into conflict with the leadership at the seminary and had to leave Trondheim in 1772 to serve as parish priest in Vadsø. A few years later, he became the first Sámi to be appointed as a dean in Eastern Finnmark. 

Because of the efforts of Anders Porsanger and the other language researchers at Seminarium Lapponicum, the Northern Sámi language survived in both written and spoken form through the harsh assimilation processes of the 19th century, when the state actively worked to eradicate Sámi culture in Norway.