Saami Language Research Articles

The effects of three-way consonant distinction in Northern Saami

Of the world’s languages, very few have been attested to possess a three-way consonant length distinction, among them Northern Saami (Uralic). However, the effects of this rare contrast on adjacent segments remain unexplored. This study reports on dialectal variation within Northern Saami and sheds light on the relationship between consonant length and the duration of preceding vowels. Three speakers were recorded: one Western Guovdageaidnu speaker and two Eastern Kárášjohka speakers. Target words were bisyllabic of the form CVV(C), with a medial short, long, or extra-long consonant, and were elicited in frame sentences. Results show dialectal differences in the number of consonant length distinctions, as well as the effects on preconsonantal vowels. The Western dialect exhibits three surface consonant lengths, while the Eastern dialect only has the longest and shortest. Interestingly, the Eastern speakers’ extra-long C are systematically longer than their Western counterparts. Preconsonantal vowels vary with consonant length in the Western dialect, while Eastern preconsonantal vowels present a broader range of contrasts. These findings suggest that the Western dialect resembles other Saami languages with three consonant lengths (e.g., McRobbie-Utasi 2007). In comparison, the Eastern dialect may instantiate some of this contrast on the preceding vowel instead.

Samisk påvirkning på skandinavisk grammatikk?

Saami influence on Scandinavian grammar? Older histories of the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) commonly assume that German has influenced the Scandinavian languages heavily. By contrast, they do not assume any significant influence from the Saami languages. This traditional view has, however, been challenged in an interesting monograph by Kusmenko (2008). While Kusmenko’s hypotheses have been met with scepticism by some specialists of Scandinavian, they have also been received favourably by some, notably Bull (for example in this journal, 2017). Yet Bull also points to an important weakness in Kusmenko’s argument – the near-absence of lexical influence despite the supposedly heavy grammatical influence. However, Bull argues that this absence is apparent rather than real; in Norwegian dialects in the very North, Saami loan-words are more numerous. In this paper, I argue that evidence from these dialects is not necessarily very relevant, since Kusmenko’s hypotheses primarily concern dialects further south. While Kusmenko and Bull are justified in criticising the ideological bias in much language historiography in Norway, and while it now seems clear that prestige relations between speakers of Saami and Scandinavian need not have been the same a millennium ago as they were a century ago, the more strictly linguistic evidence adduced by Kusmenko is still not convincing. The absence of good parallels make his scenario look less plausible.

Language teacher identity and language acquisition in a South Saami preschool: A narrative inquiry

This paper explores language teacher identity (LTI) among three preschool teachers. The focus lies on the preschool teachers’ identities as linguistic role models by means of analysing their own descriptions of language learning, that is, their personal experiences of and reflections on language acquisition. Three interviews were made with different in-service preschool teachers. The interviews were analysed by means of narrative inquiry and thematic analysis and guided by literature on LTI, as well as the researcher’s previous experience and knowledge of the current field. The findings illustrate how the teachers assumed a leading position in the South Saami language revitalisation project and cope with the responsibility tied to that position. The discussion of the narratives revolves around language teaching and learning made salient in the narrative process. The study provides a hopeful view of language revitalisation by showcasing that it is not only the expected first-language native speakers that are driving forces in the process of restoring a broken chain of intergenerational language transmission. It further illustrates a way for an Indigenous academic to investigate settings within their own community and collaborate with other stakeholders in a language revitalisation project to generate new insights on language revitalisation.

Russian loanwords in Skolt Saami

The distribution of the Russian loan vocabulary within the Saami languages centers on Skolt, Akkala, Kildin, and Ter Saami. In Skolt Saami, this loanword stratum forms the largest loanword stratum and contains more than 750 lexemes. Despite the significance of the loanword stratum, there has hardly been any actual analysis of the Russian loanwords in the Saami languages. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting an overview of Russian vocabulary in Skolt Saami from a phonological, morphological, and semantic point of view. Besides analyzing the loanwords, approximately 150 new loan etymologies are discussed and some thirty new comparisons with Russian loanwords proposed in other Saami languages. It turns out that the Russian loan lexicon is relatively recent, and most if not all the words were borrowed from the Northwestern dialects of Russian between the beginning of the 17th century and 1920. Semantically the vocabulary is heterogenous. The most important semantic categories include religion, clothing, buildings and houses, diet, as well as administration and society.

Archive Infrastructure and Spoken Language Corpora for Saami Languages in Finland

This study presents the results of an Aanaar Saami pilot project in the Saami Culture Archive, University of Oulu. The project has established a set of conventions to transcribe and annotate Aanaar Saami recordings in the archive’s collection and created a mechanism through which grammatically annotated but anonymous versions can be imported to the Korp search interface in the Language Bank of Finland. The practices include wide use of Saami language technology, the use of Finnish computational research infrastructure, and they can be extended later to other Saami languages in the archive.

Kantasaamen sensiivisen *-kše̮-johtimen kehityksestä ja edustuksesta nykysaamessa

The article discusses Saami censive verbs containing the suffixal element -š-, such as North Saami guhkášit ​‘consider (too) long’ (of guhkki ‘long’). The occurrence of individual derivatives and derivational subtypes across the Saami languages are studied on the basis of extensive dictionary data, and the outlines of the historical development of the derivational type are sketched. Considering the Inari Saami verbs of type viššâlšukšâđ ‘consider diligent’ and data from past centuries, it is argued that the derivational type goes back to Proto-Saami *-kše̮-, which, in turn, is a loan suffix from Finnic (cf. Finnish kummeksua ‘find something odd’ ← kumma ‘odd’, halveksia ‘despise’ ← halpa ‘cheap’).

Čalbmi čalmmis ja suoldnečalmmit suoidnečalmmis

North Saami čalbmi ‘eye’ (< Proto-Uralic *ćilmä) has cognates in all Uralic languages, and everywhere they refer to the visual organs of humans and animals. However, scholars have barely paid attention to the grammatical functions of čalbmi in compound-like formations such as suoldnečalbmi “dew eye”, suoidnečalbmi “grass eye”, varračalbmi “blood eye”, jiekŋačalbmi “ice eye”, vuoktačalbmi “hair eye” and muorječalbmi “berry eye”. This article examines such expressions as so-called singulatives – grammatical means for individuating a single referent from a group or mass (i.e., ‘a single drop of dew’, ‘a single blade of grass’, ‘a single drop of blood’, ‘a single crystal of ice’, ‘a single human hair’ and ‘a single berry’). The article mainly discusses morphological, syntactic and semantic features of singulatives in North Saami and other present-day Saami languages, but comparable singulatives in Khanty, Mansi and Samoyed languages as well as in Hungarian suggest that singulative expressions such as *weri-ćilmä ‘a single drop of blood’, *jäŋi-ćilmä ‘a single crystal of ice; hailstone’ and *me̮rja-ćilmä ‘a single berry’ can, in principle, be reconstructed all the way back to Proto-Uralic.

Mihin suuntaan saamen progressiivirakenteet ovat menossa?

The Saami languages utilize a long-established progressive construction based on the inflected copula verb and the so-called action essive form of the main verb, for example North Saami lea dahkamin ‘is doing’ of dahkat ‘to do’. The present paper examines an apparently innovative construction that has not been described before, similarly appearing in a progressive function but based on the inflected copula and the locative case form of the deverbal noun in -u, for example lea jođus ‘is going’ of johtit ‘to travel, go, be in motion’. The main data source used is the SIKOR corpus, containing contemporary written language material in several Saami languages; supplementary sources of both written and oral material and of different ages are used as well. The data reveals that the new construction is frequently used of the verb johtit ‘to travel, go’ in modern North Saami (leat jođus) and fairly known in Inari Saami, too (leđe joođoost). It is used more rarely of the verb mannat ‘to go’ in North Saami (leat manus); from Inari Saami there is only a single attestation of this verb in older data. Other verbs are not observed to be used in a similar construction, and the innovation seems to be confined to the contemporary use of these two Saami languages. It is argued that there are both language-internal and external factors that have contributed to the emergence of the leat jođus construction, including the global tendency of progressives to develop out of locative constructions and most importantly the model of the contact language Finnish, where a structurally identical deverbal noun based progressive construction is commonly used of the most frequent motion verbs (olla menossa ~ tulossa ~ lähdössä of mennä ‘to go’, tulla ‘to come’, lähteä ‘to depart’).

The Inari Saami Wikipedia

The Inari Saami traditionally inhabit the area around Lake Inari in northern Finland. Despite being a minority group among the Saami, the Inari Saami have distinctive cultural traits as well as their own language, which has now about 400–450 speakers, including many children. This makes it a small language community in Wikipedia terms. It is still worth noting that Inari Saami is one of the most successful revitalisation processes in the world. During the last decades the language community has organised language nests for Inari Saami children, and it has taught the language to key members of the middle generation. The third phase of the revitalisation, strengthening the literacy of the language, is now in its initial phase. And this is where Wikipedia comes into play. In my presentation I am going to illustrate how the Inari Saami Wikipedia was born and what were the steps taken by the Inari Saami Language Association to make it all happen. I will also explain how we currently encourage the community to take an active role in developing the Inari Saami Wikipedia. We try to involve people from different backgrounds, but our main focus is on young people and students who can write Wikipedia articles as part of their studies at the University of Oulu and at the Sámi Education Institute (SAKK) in Inari. The ultimate goal is to create content that caters to the needs of the Inari Saami school in Inari and to give schoolchildren the possibility to use Wikipedia in their own language as a resource for assignments and classwork.

Transformation of traditional reindeer herding technologies and pasturing practices 206on the Kola Peninsula in the 20th— early 21st century

The purpose of the article is to give an accent presentation of the transformation of technologies and tech-niques of reindeer grazing and value attitudes of the Kola reindeer herders in the 20th — early 21st century from an ethno-cultural perspective. The paper is based on the materials of the 2018 expedition to the Kola Peninsula. On the basis of using a system-analytical approach, the paper is structured as a narrative discourse, where the “floor” is given to the Kola reindeer herders themselves. As the studies show, the changes in the Kola reindeer husbandry brought about by the merger of the nomadic Samoyed-Izhem Culture, introduced to the Kola peninsula in the late 19th — early 20th century, with the semi-nomadic “cabin” Saami herding style, as well as by the Soviet period collective and state farm transformation of the traditional reindeer husbandry and the unfolding “snowmo-bile revolution” (the use of the reindeer sled has been reduced to one month in a year), have led not only to the loss of numerous traditional reindeer herding technologies, pasturing practices and herd control, but also to sig-nificant changes in the population composition, structure, and organization of the behavioral characteristics of the herds. Today, the Komi-Izhem reindeer husbandry is dominant in the Kola region. However, despite the major changes, the Kola herders are still quite flexible in using, depending on the circumstances, the advantages of both the Izhem and the Lapp reindeer husbandry systems. The return to the semi-free herds ranging practices and transition to rotational organization of reindeer herd tending in the post-Soviet period stimulated the economic revival of the herding industry and added more comfort to the reindeer herders' lifestyle, although the reindeer herding is not considered a prestigious occupation among young people. Rethinking the older generation's life experiences, together with the more critical perception of today's realities, is an indication of changes within the system of ethnic values, which formerly, in a sense, supported both the individual and collective identities of the Saami and Komi-Izhem ethnies. The transformation processes have had a particularly profound impact on the traditional Saami reindeer culture, almost destroying it, which causes painful memories and reactions of its last bearers. Displacement of the Lapp component is carried forward in the choice of preferred deer breeds and dis-appearance of the Saami language and Saami toponymy from the reindeer herding context.

Language contact and typological change: The case of Estonian revisited

The traditional hypothesis of a typological cycle from agglutination via fusion to isolation and back to agglutination, still invoked by many linguists (albeit with caveats and limitations), would imply a natural drift behind typological changes. Accordingly, such typological changes would typically result from internal developments (such as reductive sound changes), while etymological counter-currents (such as segmentable suffixes replacing earlier stem alternations) could rather be due to language contact. On the other hand, the agglutinative type seems to be stable and resistant to typological change especially in Northern Eurasia, and for the change towards a more fusional type, characteristic of some Finnic and Saami languages in the northwestern periphery of Uralic, a contact explanation might seem plausible. However, a closer scrutiny of Estonian, often mentioned as an example of typological change and characteristically impacted by Germanic, shows that in typological change, internal and external motivations intertwine and interact.

Reindeer Herding and History in the Mountains of Southern Sápmi

During the summers of 1998-2000 four Saami villages in southern Sapmi carried out a survey of traditional reindeer herding sites. Reindeer herding of today engages a small Saami minority, but the reindeer herders are important as bearers of Saami culture and language. Reindeer herding has, however, been called into question from several different directions. In this process, which often leads to court, the ability of the Saami villages to present evidence of previous reindeer herding in a region, either in written records or as remains in the landscape, has become an argument for the continued rights of use of certain winter-grazing areas. As a result, archaeology has acquired a new relevance for the Saami villages. But the procedures of archaeological surveys and of the cultural heritage conservation in Sweden are based on ethnocentric assumptions. In a cultural sense, Sapmi of the past and present-day Sweden belong to two different continents, even though they happen to be situated in the same comer of the world. When working with Saami history it is necessary to do away with the distinction between "nature" and "culture", just like a number of other dualisms that are relevant only in a (modern) Western context. If we replace "nature" and "culture" with "environment", we will increase our possibilities to translate Saami history into the language of archaeology and to make archaeology relevant to local people in the mountain region.

Правила орфографии для младописьменного языка: случай кильдинского саамского

The article discusses principles for designing alphabets and spelling rules for non-written languages, taking into account their sociolinguistic status. The negative experience of spelling rules developed for the Kildin Saami language is analyzed.

Антропологическая лингвистика и методология исследования лексики исчезающего языка коренного малочисленного народа севера

The purpose of the article is to determine the specifics of the research methodology of such a phenomenon as the endangered language of the indigenous people. The Kildin Saami language is considered as an subject of study, and the vocabulary of this language is considered as an object. The new idea of the work consists in a cognitive approach to the forms and methods of cognition of the endangered language of the Kola North in the framework of anthropological linguistics. It is shown that the reliance on the experience of native speakers of the small indigenous people of the North is crucial in the methodology of its research. Interviews, questionnaires, field studies should be combined in the study of the vocabulary of such a language with the methods of generalization and comparison. It is emphasized that the comparison method in studying the vocabulary of an indigenous minority can be used to solve the problem of distinguishing between scientific and naive knowledge of realities, and therefore, distinguishing between “naive-language” and “scientific” pictures of the world. The specificity of using the comparison technique, which consists in the features of the compared objects, is noted. For endangered languages, the article proposes to compare written sources, including dictionaries of the past and / or beginning of the last twentieth century, and oral materials of modern field research. It is argued that this way of analysis helps to determine the degree of preservation of the language, which is under threat of extinction. It has been established that a cognitive approach to the analysis of the vocabulary of the Kildin Saami language reveals not only the presence / absence of gaps in the linguistic consciousness of the modern native speaker, but also the connotative meanings associated with imposing a traditional folk worldview with the realities of the modern life of the indigenous people.

REVITALIZING SAAMI THROUGH EDUCATION IN FINLAND

The article deals with the institutional aspects of how indigenous minority languages are taught in Finland, with particular attention to sustainability and revitalization issues among the Saami minority. The source material for the research project was obtained during field work organized by the International Research Group on Bilingual Education of the Faculty of Central European Studies at Constantine the Philosopher University (Nitra, Slovakia), conducted in Finland in 2019. The aim of the expedition was to study strategies for revitalizing the Saami language in Finland in the context of code switching. The authors of the article want to highlight how legal regulation can take into account educational problems that arise in different situations. In Finland, on a legislative basis, two languages (Finnish and Swedish) are taught, so all citizens, regardless of nationality, learn both of them. The law guarantees access to Saami education, i.e. it is optional for everyone. The education system offers opportunities for learning the Saami language in preschool educational institutions, in general education schools, as well as for individual groups, adult citizens. At the same time, the authors emphasize the fact that although state regulation centralizes education in the European Union, and in particular in Finland, the revitalization program of minority languages is still being successfully implemented, mostly due to the fact that program coordinators take into account the diversity and variety of cases and, as a result, adopt certain normative acts to solve different situations. Only society, political decision-makers, self-operating and self-conscious civil activity can help developing a successful national education system where bilingualism is reachable for minorities with significantly different backgrounds.

Kantasaamesta eteläkantasaameen

This article examines which loaning features indicate that the predecessor of South Saami – Southern Proto-Saami – drifted off from common Late Proto-Saami at an early date. We also suggest that this drift refers to linguistic immigration to central Scandinavia where South Saami is spoken today. Loanword ev­idence provided are those from Northwest Germanic and Proto-Scandinavian found in South Saami that either have irregular sound substitutes compared to other Saami languages (e.g. South Saami word-me­dial -r- in snaejrie ‘slice (of bread, cheese)’ cf. Inari Saami -tt- in snáittu ‘splint’; South Saami initial h- in haame ‘antlerless reindeer doe’ cf. North Saami ápmil); they are not found in any other Saami language (e.g. saar- in Saaraahka ‘creative old woman (divinity)’) or they have deviating semantic meaning com­pared to other Saami languages (South Saami duvrie ‘bear’; cf. North Saami divri ‘insect’). The number of such loanwords is 53 out of about 170. Even those loanwords, which do not show any kind of irregu­larity when compared to other Saami languages, may have been borrowed into South Saami separately, however they do not contain any of those sounds that started a deviating development after the drift. In absolute chronology, the initial areal and dialectal drift happened in southern Finland around 200 CE. Features presented here are so numerous, though many of them are still quite sporadic, that we find there is sufficient evidence to show the early drift of South Saami. This dating also correlates with the changes seen in archaeological data taken from the South Saami-speaking area. Thus, the changes in archaeolog­ical material most likely are caused by Saami speakers arriving to a new land and their intensively active contacts with the people already inhabiting the area.

К проблеме звуковой семантики традиционных саамских музыкальных инструментов

The article explores the issue of the sonic semantics of traditional Saami musical instruments. The problem of studying the semantic aspects of Saami tradition lies in the fact of the absence of definite images and concepts, which may be explained to a large extent by the fading of archaic forms of sonic communication in the ethnicity's culture of intonation and acoustics. Meanwhile, the preservation of syncretic phenomena, which mark the interrelated and indivisible world of objects' spiritual values, makes it possible to determine the methods of studying the semantics of the traditional cultural objects in question. First and foremost, the specificity of the Saami aesthetic belief system is connected with the highly subtle perception of natural surroundings and is determined by old beliefs, which are based on the Saami animistic notion of objects of material nature. Integrating the complex of sonic perception of the surrounding space makes it possible to establish the coordinates of the Saami conception of the unity between world-view and sound, manifested through non-differentiation of the sound source – whether vocal, instrumental or kinetic. The author's approach, based on the equivalence of sound realizations, is equipped to determine the proposed conception from the viewpoint of ethnomusicological interpretation (catalyst) of the archaic phenomena of the Saami syncretic art of sound. The turn to the onomatopoeic vocabulary of the Saami language is conjugated with revealing the specificity of timbre and articulation in Saami instrumentalism. Such an interdisciplinary coordination between two branches of knowledge – linguistics and ethno-organology – enables the researcher to define the performing technique of playing traditional Saami instruments on the semantic basis of kinesiological and visual perception. Keywords: saami, semantics of sound, musical instruments, kinesiological and visual perception.

Саамский язык: проблемы сохранения и функционирования миноритарного языка в условиях русскоязычного окружения

The article presents an analysis of the sociolinguistic situation in the Kola North with the Kildin Saami language. Purpose of work – to consider the historical reasons for the situation of the indigenous language of the North, as well as the current situation with educational programs in the Kildin Saami language. The following method was used in the study: descriptive method. The result of the analysis is that in the study indicates the directions of activity of state structures and Saami activists to improve the functioning of the language, shows that in the conditions of the Russian-speaking environment, the chance for the survival of a minority language has a distance education, recommendations to the activities for conservation and revitalization Kildin Saami language. The study showed that the most suitable teaching technology for the dispersed population is the organization of training on the basis of specially prepared distance learning courses integrated into a single system on the training portal, which not only organizes training in the form of transferring teaching and methodological material to the learner for assimilation, but also monitors and evaluates the knowledge gained in asynchronous mode, analysis of the quality of the passage of educational material.

The Orographic Lexicon in the Kildin Saami Language

The Orographic Lexicon in the Kildin Saami Language

Anthropocentricity of the language of the native low-numbered population of the north (based on the example of landscape-related vocabulary in the Kildin Saami language)

Anthropocentricity of the language of the native low-numbered population of the north (based on the example of landscape-related vocabulary in the Kildin Saami language)