Northern Sami
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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:
- indicative
- imperative
- conditional
- potential
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 | |
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
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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