Northern Sami

History

Among the first printed Sami texts is Svenske och Lappeske ABC Book ("Swedish and Lappish ABC book"), written in Swedish and what is likely a form of Northern Sami. It was published in two editions in 1638 and 1640 and includes 30 pages of prayers and confessions of Protestant faith. It has been described as the first book "with a regular Sami language form".

Northern Sami was first described by Knud Leem (En lappisk Grammatica efter den Dialect, som bruges af Field-Lapperne udi Porsanger-Fiorden) in 1748 and in dictionaries in 1752 and 1768. One of Leem's fellow grammaticians was Anders Porsanger, who studied at the Trondheim Cathedral School and other schools, but who was unable to publish his work on Sami due to racist attitudes at the time. The majority of his work has disappeared.

Roots

The roots of the current orthography for Northern Sami were laid by Rasmus Rask who, after discussions with Nils Vibe Stockfleth, published Ræsonneret lappisk sproglære efter den sprogart, som bruges af fjældlapperne i Porsangerfjorden i Finmarken. En omarbejdelse af Prof. Knud Leems Lappiske grammatica in 1832. Rask opted for a phonemic orthographic system. All of the orthographies that have been used for Northern Sami trace their roots back to Rask's system, unlike the orthographies used for Lule and Southern Sami, which are mainly based on the orthographical conventions of Swedish and Norwegian. Following in the tradition of Rask meant that diacritics were used with some consonants (č, đ, ŋ, š, ŧ and ž), which caused data-processing problems before Unicode was introduced. Both Stockfleth and J. A. Friis went on to publish grammar books and dictionaries for Sami. It can be said that Northern Sami was better described than Norwegian was before Ivar Aasen published his grammar on Norwegian.

Orthography

Northern Sami was and is used in three countries, each of which used its own orthography for years. Friis' orthography was used when work on translating the Bible into Northern Sami commenced, in the first Sami newspaper called Saǥai Muittalægje, and in the Finnemisjonen's own newspaper Nuorttanaste. The groundwork for Northern Sami lexicography was laid by Konrad Nielsen who used an orthography of his own creation in his dictionary Lappisk ordbok. Starting in 1948, the orthographies used in Norway and Sweden were combined into a single Bergsland-Ruong orthography. It was not greatly used in Norway. In addition, the authorities there instituted a policy that prohibited Sami from being used in practice.

In Sweden, classes were taught in Sami in the Sami schools, as the policy of Lapp ska vara lapp (Sami should be a Sami) was applied to those reindeer herders with the intention of keeping them separated from larger society. In 1979, an official orthography for Northern Sami was adopted for use in Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Assimilation

The mass mobilization during the Alta controversy as well as a more tolerant political environment caused a change to the Norwegian policy of assimilation during the last decades of the twentieth century. In Norway, Northern Sami is currently an official language of two counties (Finnmark and Troms) and six municipalities (Kautokeino, Karasjok, Nesseby, Tana, Porsanger and Gáivuotna (Kåfjord)). Sami born before 1977 have never learned to write Sami according to the currently used orthography in school, so it is only in recent years that there have been Sami capable of writing their own language for various administrative positions.

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Northern Sami is large, consisting of three different series of plosives/affricates (voiceless, voiced and preaspirated) and two series of nasals (plain and glottalized). In addition, length (gemination) is contrastive for almost all consonants.

All consonants can be geminated (held longer), except for /h/. This distinction is phonemically contrastive and widely productive as a grammatical feature. Geminated glottalized nasals are realised with the glottalization in between the two consonants (/mʔm/, /nʔn/, /ɲʔɲ/). In geminated preaspirated consonants, it is the preaspiration that lengthens rather than the occlusion (/hːp/, /hːt/, /hːts/, /hːtʃ/, /hːk/).

Except for glottalized or preaspirated consonants, /h/, /j/ or /ʎ/, all consonants also possess a third "overlong" length. Overlong consonants are somewhat longer still than regular long consonants. However, vowels are shortened by a following overlong consonant, so it is unclear whether the consonant or the vowel length is contrastive. Overlong consonants are not indicated in the standard orthography, but are commonly denoted with an apostrophe between the two consonant letters (⟨p'p⟩, ⟨m'm⟩ etc.) in reference works when the distinction is relevant.

Vowels

Northern Sami possesses the following monophthongs:

Several diphthongs also exist, all of the opening type. They are only present in stressed syllables.

Closing diphthongs such as ái also exist, but these are phonologically composed of a vowel plus one of the semivowels /v/ or /j/. The semivowels still behave as consonants in clusters.

Prosody

Stress is generally not phonemic in Northern Sami; the first syllable of a word is normally stressed. Like most Sami languages, Northern Sami follows a pattern of alternating (trochaic) stress, in which each odd-numbered syllable is relatively stressed and even-numbered syllables are unstressed. The last syllable of a word is never stressed, unless the word has only one syllable.

Consequently, words can follow three possible patterns:

This gives the following pattern, which can be extended indefinitely in theory. S indicates stress, _ indicates no stress:

The number of syllables, and the resulting stress pattern, is important for grammatical reasons. Words with stems having an even number of syllables inflect differently from words with stems having an odd number of syllables. This is detailed further in the grammar section.

Some recent loanwords such as kultuvra ("culture") or advearba ("adverb") have a stressed second syllable instead. The stress pattern is the same as for words with initial stress, except shifted by one syllable.

In compound words, which consist of several distinct word roots, each word retains its own stress pattern. If the first element of a compound has an odd number of syllables, then there will be a sequence of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, which does not occur in non-compound words. Hence, stress is lexically significant in that it can theoretically distinguish compounds from non-compounds.

Conjunctions, postpositions, particles, and monosyllabic pronouns tend to be unstressed altogether, and therefore fall outside the above rules.

Syntax

Northern Sami is an SVO language.

Orthography

Northern Sami has a long orthographic history, which has had no fewer than 9 Latin alphabets.

Until the official orthography currently in use was adopted in 1979, each country had its own, slightly different standard, so it is quite possible to come across older books that are difficult to understand for people unacquainted with the orthography:

1. Maanat leät poahtan skuvllai.
2. Mánát leat boahtán skuvlii.

(The children have come to school.)

The first sentence is from Antti Outakoski's Samekiela kiellaoahpa from 1950; the second one is how it would be written according to the current orthography.

Alphabet

The most recent alphabet was approved in 1979 and last modified in 1985:

The phoneme /j/ is written as j when a vowel follows, as i otherwise.

The table shows the most basic pronunciation of each of the letters. There are many more consonants shown in the table in the Consonants section above. They are represented by digraphs and trigraphs that are described below.

When typing, if there is no way of entering the letters particular to Northern Sami (Áá Čč Đđ Ŋŋ Šš Ŧŧ Žž) correctly, an acute accent is sometimes placed over the corresponding Latin letter as a substitute. These substitutions are still found in books printed after the common orthography was adopted due to system limitations when typing.

Dialects

Northern Sami can be divided into four major dialect groups: Torne, East Finnmark, West Finnmark (written standard) and Sea Sami.

Grammar

Northern Sami is an agglutinative, highly inflected language that shares many grammatical features with the other Uralic languages. Sami has also developed considerably into the direction of fusional and inflected morphology, much like Estonian to which it is distantly related. Therefore, morphemes are marked not only by suffixes but also by morphophonological modifications to the root. Of the various morphophonological alterations, the most important and complex is the system of consonant gradation.

Consonant gradation

Consonant gradation is a pattern of alternations between pairs of consonants that appears in the inflection of words. The system of consonant gradation in Northern Sami is complex, especially compared to that found in the Finnic languages. A word stem can appear in two grades: the strong grade and the weak grade. Historically, the weak grade appeared when the syllable in which the consonant appeared was closed (ended in another consonant), but the loss of certain vowels or consonants have obscured this in Northern Sami and it is now a more-or-less opaque process.

Consonants show a three-level gradation pattern, with higher level being "stronger" in some sense. A given word can alternate either between level 3 in the strong grade and level 2 in the weak grade, or between level 2 in the strong grade and level 1 in the weak grade. The level of a consonant depends on how it interacts with the preceding vowel: a vowel is always shortened when a level 3 consonant follows. Thus, all consonant clusters (combinations of different consonants) have level 3/2 gradation, only non-clusters can be level 1.

Non-clusters

The full three-level patterns apply to short, long and overlong consonants of any type, except for long voiced/voiceless occlusives.

Level 2 → level 1 alternations:

Level 3 → level 2 alternations:

Note that short ⟨lj⟩ does not occur, and the consonant only has level 3/2 gradation.

Long voiced/voiceless occlusives

Long voiced occlusives alternate with long voiceless occlusives. These behave as clusters, and are therefore level 3/2 in terms of weight.

An exception here is ⟨dj⟩, which has three levels.

Clusters ending with glottalized nasal

Clusters ending with glottalized nasals can behave in two ways. If the first member of the cluster is ⟨r⟩, then the nasal changes from long glottalized to short glottalized. In other cases, the nasal changes to long plain.

Other clusters

All other clusters have doubling of the final consonant of the cluster in the weak grade. In clusters beginning with ⟨k⟩, the ⟨k⟩ itself also changes to ⟨v⟩.

Diphthong simplification

Diphthong simplification is a process whereby a diphthong loses its second component and becomes a monophthong:

Diphthong simplification mostly occurs when the next syllable contains one of the vowels e or o, or the sequences ii or ui. However, there are exceptions, both systematic and unpredictable, so the process is not purely phonological. For example, in nouns with stems ending in -u, simplification occurs in the illative singular (viessu "house" → vissui "into the house") but not in any of the plural forms (viessuide "into the houses").

Changes to word-final consonants

Only a limited number of consonants is allowed at the end of a word. Therefore, consonants will be modified when they come to stand word-finally. The following table shows these changes:

When a consonant cluster appears word-finally, all consonants except the first are removed.

Inflection types

All inflected words, whether nouns, adjectives or verbs, can be divided into three main inflectional classes. The division is based on whether there is an even or odd number of syllables from the last stressed syllable to the end of the word.

For nouns and adjectives, the stem is taken from the accusative/genitive singular rather than the nominative, as the latter often drops the final vowel and sometimes also the preceding consonant. For verbs, the infinitive is used to determine the stem, by removing the infinitive ending -t.

Words with even and contracted inflection can be divided further, based on the final vowel of the stem. For even-inflected words, this vowel is most commonly a, i or u, while for contracted words it is mostly á, e or o. Words with odd inflection are not differentiated by stem-final vowel.

Nouns

Nouns inflect in singular (ovttaidlohku) and plural (máŋggaidlohku), and also for one of 7 cases. The following table shows the general endings; the actual forms can differ based on consonant gradation and the inflection type of the word.

The accusative and genitive are always identical. There is no singular/plural distinction in the essive, so that for example mánnán is interpreted as either "as a child" or "as children".

Nouns with even inflection

Nouns with even inflection have consonant gradation of the last consonant in the stem. The strong grade appears in the nominative, illative and essive singular, while the weak grade appears in the remaining forms.

The most common of this type are the nouns with a stem ending in -a, -i or slightly rarer -u.

Even-syllable nouns with a stem ending in -á, -e or -o also exist, but are much rarer.

Even-syllable nouns with four or more syllables sometimes drop the final vowel in the nominative singular. Consequently, simplification of the final consonant occurs. The stem of these nouns always ends in -a.

Nouns with odd inflection

Nouns with odd inflection have consonant gradation. The weak grade appears in the nominative and essive singular, while the strong grade appears in the remaining forms. Some nouns also have other alternations in the stem of the strong grade, such as changes of i to á, u to o, or addition of a consonant.

Nouns with contracted inflection

Nouns with contracted inflection have consonant gradation. The pattern follows that of odd-inflection nouns, with the weak grade in the nominative and essive singular, and the strong grade in the remainder. If the weak grade is level 1, the strong grade will be level 3. The final syllable is generally altered along with the gradation as well.

Possessive suffixes

The possessive suffixes are similar in meaning to the English personal possessive determiners my, your, their and so on. There are 9 possessive suffixes: one for each person in singular, dual and plural. Possessive suffixes attach to the end of a noun, after the case ending. Thus, for example, ruovttus "in a house" may become ruovttustan "in my house".

Like noun case endings, the suffixes have different forms depending on whether they are attached to a stem with an even or odd number of syllables, and (in the case of even-syllable stems) depending on the last vowel of the stem. The following table shows the suffixes:

The suffixes attach to a combination of noun plus case ending, so the stem that the suffix is attached to may not be the stem of the noun. Rather, a new "possessive stem" is formed from the noun with its case ending included. This stem is not always identical to the ending of the noun on its own; some case endings undergo modifications or the addition of a final vowel. Thus, certain cases may have possessive stems that inherently end in -a, other cases may have -i, but this is only significant if the combination has an even number of syllables.

The following table shows the possessive stems for each case, for four of the nouns whose inflection was given above. If the stem ends in a vowel, it is even and the suffixes with the matching vowel are used. If the stem ends in a consonant, it is odd and the odd endings are used.

In the comitative plural, the possessive suffix attaches between the possessive stem and the final -guin.

As can be seen in the table, for the nominative, accusative and genitive singular cases, the possessive stem is identical to the noun stem. The stem also undergoes consonant gradation in the accusative and genitive singular forms, and endings beginning with e or o also trigger diphthong simplification. The noun is in the strong grade with the first-person possessive suffixes, and in the weak grade with the second- and third-person possessives.

The possessive forms of ruoktu are:

Adjectives

Adjectives inflect the same as nouns do, and have the same cases and inflection types.

Attributive form

Adjectives also have an additional form, the attributive form (attribuhttahápmi). This form is used when the adjective is used attributively, where it precedes the noun. The attributive does not receive any endings, so it does not have cases or number. Its formation is also unpredictable: for some adjectives, it's formed from the nominative singular by adding an extra ending of some kind to the stem, while for others the attributive is formed by removing part of the stem. It may also be identical to the nominative singular. Some examples:

Not all adjectives have an attributive form. For example, the frequently-used adjective buorre "good" has only case forms. When there is no attributive form, this doesn't mean it can't be used attributively. Instead, the case and number of the adjective matches that of the noun it is an attribute of (as in for example Finnish).

Personal pronouns

The personal pronouns inflect irregularly, and also have a third number, the dual (guvttiidlohku). The dual is used to refer to exactly two people. The following table shows the forms.

Demonstratives

The five demonstrative determiners/pronouns inflect somewhat irregularly as well. The nominative singular and nominative plural are identical, and some other cases have endings not found in nouns.

When these words modify a noun rather than standing alone, the demonstrative is in the same case as the noun, with the following exceptions:

Interrogatives

The interrogative/relative pronouns/determiners gii "who" and mii "what" are likewise irregular.

In the accusative singular of mii, there are two possible forms. The "regular" form man is used when there is an implication of a choice from a limited number of options. The form máid has no such implication.

These two pronouns, as well as other interrogatives (which inflect regularly) can act as determiners and modify nouns. The rules for which case to use are the same as for the demonstrative. The form máid is followed by a noun in the accusative plural form.

Reflexive pronoun

The reflexive pronoun is ieš (dual and plural ieža), meaning myself, yourself, himself, herself and so on. In its base form, the pronoun occurs only in the nominative case and is never used on its own; it always occurs next to the subject of the sentence, where it acts as an adverb to strengthen it. Compare for example sentences such as I myself have never seen it..

The other cases can occur by themselves, but only in the singular, and are always used in combination with a possessive suffix that matches the subject of the sentence (i.e. always I see myself, never I see himself). These forms are irregular as well as suppletive: the illative and locative forms derive from completely different roots. There are also several alternative stems.

Verbal categories

The conjugation of Northern Sami verbs resembles that of Finnish. There are three grammatical persons (persovnnat), and three grammatical numbers (logut), singular, dual and plural. There are four or five grammatical moods (vuogit):

Tense is also distinguished, but only in the indicative. There are two tenses (tempusat):

Finally, there are several non-finite forms.

Negative verb

Northern Sami, like other Uralic languages, has a negative verb that conjugates according to mood (indicative, imperative and optative), person (1st, 2nd and 3rd) and number (singular, dual and plural).

The negative verb in Northern Sami does not conjugate according to tense.