Northern Sami

Northern or North Sami (also written Sámi or Saami; formerly Lappish or Lapp) is the most widely spoken of all Sami languages. It can be divided into a three major dialect groups: Torne, Finnmark and Sea Sami. All together, North Sami spreads out across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Depending on the survey, this estimate can bring the population of North Sami speakers to be somewhere between 15,000 speakers and 25,000 speakers.

Grammar

Northern Sami is an agglutinative, highly inflected language that shares many grammatic features with the other Uralic languages. Sami has also developed considerably into the direction of fusional and inflected morphology, much like Estonian. Therefore, cases are marked also by modifications to the root, not only suffixes.

Cases

North Sámi has 7 cases in the singular, although the genitive and accusative are the same, so some people might state that it only has 6 cases:

The form the essive (marker: -n) takes is the same in the singular and in the plural, i.e., mánnán (as a child/as children).

Pronouns

The personal pronouns have three numbers - singular, plural and dual. The following table contains personal pronouns in the nominative and genitive/accusative cases.

	English	nominative	English	genitive
First person (singular)	I	mun	my	mu
Second person (singular)	you (thou)	don	your, yours	du
Third person (singular)	he, she	son	his, her	su
First person (dual)	we (two)	moai	our	munno
Second person (dual)	you (two)	doai	your	dudno
Third person (dual)	they (two)	soai	theirs	sudno
First person (plural)	we	mii	our	min
Second person (plural)	you	dii	your	din
Third person (plural)	they	sii	their	sin

The next table demonstrates the declension of a personal pronoun he/she (no gender distinction) in various cases:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	son	soai	sii
Genitive-Accusative	su	sudno	sin
Locative	sus	sudnos	sis
Illative	sutnje	sudnuide	sidjiide
Comitative	suinna	sudnuin	singuin
Essive	sunin	sudnon	sinin

Mood

Northern Sámi has 4 grammatical moods:

Phonology

Writing system

Northern Sami is written in an extended version of the Latin alphabet.

A a	Á á	B b	C c	Č č	D d	Đ đ	E e	F f	G g

H h	I i	J j	K k	L l	M m	N n	Ŋ ŋ	O o	P p

R r	S s	Š š	T t	Ŧ ŧ	U u	V v	Z z	Ž ž

Possible variants may be found for Č/č, Š/š, and Ž/ž, in which they are written as (respectively): Ć/ć, Ś/ś, and Ź/ź. Sometimes, Á/á is written instead as À/à. These are considered orthographic errors.

The official orthography currently in use was adopted at the end of the 1970s, providing all of the countries where Northern Sámi is spoken with a single orthography. Until then, each country had had its own, slightly differing form so it is quite possible to come across older books that are difficult to understand if you are not used to them:

The orthography used in Antti Outakoski's Samekiela kielloahpa from 1950:

Maanat leät poahtan skuvllai.

The same sentence written in the current official orthography:

Mánát leat boahtán skuvllai. (The children have come to school.)

References

Sami languages | Languages of Finland | Languages of Norway

External links

Kimberli Mäkäräinen A Northern Sámi-English vocabulary (5019 words as of 15 October 2003)
Northern Sámi - Inari Sámi - Skolt Sámi - English dictionary (requires a password nowadays)
Names of birds found in Sápmi in a number of languages, including Skolt Sámi and English. Search function only works with Finnish input though.
Sámi language technology project
Sámi dictionary and terminology database
Sámi proofing tools project

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