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Skolt Sami

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Skolt Sami (sää´mǩiõll) is a Finno-Ugric, Sami language spoken in Finland and nearby parts of Russia. It has about 400 remaining speakers in Finland. It is written using an official Roman orthography.

Contents

History

The Skolt Sami language was spoken in four villages on Finnish territory prior to the Second World War. In Petsamo, there was Suonikylä, and the Petsamo village. This area was ceded to Russia in the Second World War, and Skolts were evacuated to the villages of Inari, Sevettijärvi and Nellimö in the Inari municipality.

As a historic note, this region was hit hard by the first of the great famines of the 19th Century which happened about 1913. Most people moved out of this northernmost area to the Americas or parts of Fennoscandia further South as a consequence.

For those interested in doing Sami-American research, check York county, Pennsylvania. This area had five Sami settlements since the 17th Century. Many Skolt Sami fled there to escape the famine mentioned above.

Status

Skolt Sami is spoken by some 400 individuals. Nearly all of these live in Finland; very few speakers remain today on the Russian side. On the Finnish side of the border, the language is officially supported. It is an official language in the municipality of Inari, and the elementary schools offer courses in the language. However, most youths have Finnish as their first language, so that it must be taught like a foreign language. A small number of youths do learn the language and continue to use it actively. Skolt Sami is thus a seriously endangered language, unlike the neighboring Inari Sami with the same number of speakers, in the same municipality.

Like Inari Sami, Skolt Sami has recently bore witness to a new phenomenon, namely it is being used in rock songs sung by Tiina Sanila, who recently published her first full-length CD in Skolt Sami.

Grammar

Skolt Sami is a synthetic, highly inflected language that shares many grammatical features with the other Uralic languages. However, Skolt Sami is not a typical agglutinative language like many of the other Uralic languages are, as it has developed considerably into the direction of a fusional language, much like Estonian. Therefore, cases and other grammatical features are also marked by modifications to the root and not just marked with suffixes. Many of the suffixes in Skolt Sami are portmanteau morphemes that express several grammatical features at a time.

Cases

Skolt Sámi has 9 cases in the singular, although the genitive and accusative are oftentimes the same:

Nominative

Like the other Uralic languages, the nominative singular is unmarked and indicates the subject or a predicate. The nominative plural is also unmarked and always looks the same as the genitive singular.

Genitive

The genitive singular is unmarked and looks the same as the nominative plural. The genitive plural is marked by an -i. The genitive is used:

The genitive has been replacing the partitive for some time and is nowdays more commonly used in its place.

Accusative

The accusative is the direct object case and it is unmarked in the singular. In the plural, its marker is -d, which is preceded by the plural marker -i, making it look the same as the plural illative. The accusative is also used to mark some adjuncts, e.g., obb tää'lv (the entire winter).

Locative

The locative marker in the singular is -st and -n in the plural. This case is used to indicate:

In addition, it is used with certain verbs:

Illative

The illative marker actually has three different markers in the singular to represent the same case: -a, -e and -u. The plural illative marker is -d, which is preceded by the plural marker -i, making it look the same as the plural accusative. This case is used to indicate:

Comitative

The comitative marker in the singular is -in and -vui'm in the plural. The comitative is used to state with whom or what something was done.

Abessive

The abessive marker is -tää in both the singular and the plural. It always has a tertiary stress.

Essive

The dual form of the essive is still used with pronouns, but not with nouns and does not appear at all in the plural.

Partitive

The partitive is only used in the singular and can always be replaced by the genitive. The partitive marker is -d.

1. It appears after numbers larger than 6:

This can be replaced with kää'uc čâustõõǥǥ.

2. It is also used with certain postpositions:

This can be replaced with kuä'đ vuâstta.

3. It can be used with the comparative to express that which is being compared:

This would nowadays more than likely be replaced by pue'rab ko kå'll

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 mon my muu
Second person (singular) you (thou) ton your, yours tuu
Third person (singular) he, she son his, her suu
First person (dual) we (two) muäna our muännai
Second person (dual) you (two) tuäna your tuännai
Third person (dual) they (two) suäna theirs suännai
First person (plural) we mij our mij
Second person (plural) you tij your tij
Third person (plural) they sij their sij

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

  Singular Dual Plural
Nominative son suäna sij
Genitive suu suännai sij
Accusative suu suännaid si'jjid
Illative su'nne suännaid si'jjid
Locative su'st suännast sii'st
Comitative suin suännain si'jjivui'm
Abessive suutää suännaitää si'jjitää
Essive suu'nen suännan --
Partitive suu'đed -- --

Verbs

Mood

Skolt Sámi has 4 grammatical moods:

Tense

Skolt Sámi has 2 simple tenses:

and 2 compound tenses:

Verbal nouns

Skolt Sámi verbs have 6 nominal forms:

Phonology

Special features of this Sami language include a highly complex vowel system and a suprasegmental contrast of palatalized vs. non-palatalized stress groups; palatalized stress groups are indicated by a "softener mark", represented by the free-standing acute accent (´).

Vowels

The system of vowel phonemes is as follows.

front central back
unrounded unrounded unrounded rounded
close i u
close-mid e õ o
open-mid ε â å
open ä a

Notes:

Long and short vowels contrast phonologically: cf. le´tt "vessel" vs. lee´tt "vessels". All vowels can occur as both long and short.

The vowels can combine to form twelve opening diphthongs:

front front to central back to front back to central back
close to close-mid ie iõ ue uõ
close to open-mid iε iâ uε uâ uå
close to open uä

close-mid to open-mid eâ
close-mid to open eä

Also diphthongs contrast length, although this is not indicated in spelling. Short diphthongs are distinguished from long ones by both length and stress placement; short diphthongs have a stressed second component, whereas long diphthongs have stress on the first component. With the exception of eâ, all diphthongs can occur as both long and short; eâ, however, only occurs as short.

Consonants

Consonants may be phonemically long or short word-medially or word-finally; both are exceedingly common. A typical Sami feature is that also consonant clusters may be long or short, e.g. ju´rdded "to think", kuoskkâd "to touch".

In consonants, all voiced plosives are half-voiced (weak voicing). Alveolar affricates are denoted Ʒ [dz] (voiced) and C [ts] (voiceless). The caron is used inconsistently for postalveolar articulation in Č [tʃ], Ǯ [dʒ], Š [ʃ], Ž [ʒ], and for the palatal or velar palatalized stops Ǧ [ɟ] and Ǩ [c]. The latter (Ǩ, Ǧ) are in between K and T with respect to place of articulation. (Notice the disagreement between Skolt Sami orthography and IPA, and the difference between historical and synchronic palatalization.) The strike indicates fricative articulation; D is a dental stop, Đ is a dental fricative.

Palatalization is distinguished for three degrees. The plain form is velarized and receives no overt marking, the palatalized form is recognized by an adjacent softener mark, and full palatal articulation receives overt marking by digraphs in 'j'. For example, plain L is velarized with the tip of the tongue barely touching the back of the teeth, the softened ´L is constricted by keeping the tongue wider against the teeth, and the fully palatal LLJ has the middle of the tongue touching the hard palate. The same distinction is found for N, ´N and NJ.

Stress

Skolt Sámi has four different types of stress for words:

The first syllable of any word is always the primary stressed syllable in Skolt Sami as Skolt is a fixed-stress language. In words with two or more syllables, the final syllable is quite lightly stressed (tertiary stress) and the remaining syllable, if any, are stressed more heavily than the final syllable, but less than the first syllable (secondary stress).

Using the abessive and the comitative singular in a word appears to disrupt this system, however, in words of more than one syllable. The suffix, as can be expected, has teratiary stress, but the the penult syllable also has tertiary stress, even though it would be expected that it would have secondary stress.

Zero stress can be said to be a feature of conjunctions, postpositions, particles and monosyllabic pronouns.

Writing system

A short period of voicelessness or 'h' before geminate consonants is observed, but this receives no marking, e.g. jo´kke "to the river" is pronounced [jo̟hk̟k̟e]. The epenthetic vowels are not phonemic or syllabic, and thus not marked, e.g. mie´ll [miellɘ̯] "sandbank", cf. mielle [mielle] "to the mind". The Latin alphabet is used: A/a, Â/â, B/b, C/c, Č/č, Ʒ/ʒ, Ǯ/ǯ, D/d, Đ/đ, E/e, F/f, G/g, Ǧ/ǧ, Ǥ/ǥ, H/h, I/i, J/j, K/k, Ǩ/ǩ, L/l, M/m, N/n, Ŋ/ŋ, O/o, Õ/õ, P/p, R/r, S/s, Š/š, T/t, U/u, V/v, Z/z, Ž/ž, Å/å, Ä/ä, ´ (softener mark). The letters Q/q, W/w, X/x, Y/y and Ö/ö are also used in words of a foreign origin.

References

External links

 

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