Saami language

The Saami languages are languages from the Finno-Ugric languages group, spoken by the Saami people of Lapland.

In 2001 there were around ten known Saami languages.

6 of these have a standard written language, the 4 other are literally not in use, ie. there are less than 100 people that speak them.

The 6 written languages are

- Northern Sami[?] (Norway, Sweden, Finland). Probably more than 75% of all Sami speakers in 2002. There has been a number of grammars for this dialect. In 1948, a common grammar. This grammar was last modified in 1985. 7 characters not found in Scandinavian or Finnish:

• a-acute
• c-caron
• d-strek
• eng
• s-caron
• t-strek
• z-caron

- Lule Sami[?] (Norway, Sweden)

Common grammar, less special characters (only a-acute and nacute). The character nacute is the eng-sound found in the Norwegian word "sang". Instead of nacute, found in Unicode, many use ñ or even ng.

- Southern Sami[?] (Norway, Sweden)

Written using Norwegian or Swedish characters, some variants of Swedish or Norwegian æ and ø.

- Enare Sami[?] (Finland)

This dialect use 7 special characters.

- Skolte Sami[?] (Finland, also previously in Norway and Russia)

- Kildin Sami[?] (Russia)

Using Cyrillic types setting, Russian characters with some special characters.

External link and reference

• http://cvs.skolelinux.no/info/samisk/bakgrunn.html