Northern Sami
From Freepedia
Northern Saami (also, Sámi or Sami, formerly 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.
Northern Sami makes use of the latin alphabet, and contains the following characters: A/a, Á/á, B/b, C/c, Č/č, D/d, Ð/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. Finnish orthography is similar, but C is the voiceless alveolar affricate [ts], the caron in Č [tʃ], Š [ʃ], and Ž [ʒ] indicates postalveolar articulation, and the strike in Ð and Ŧ indicates (dental) fricative articulation. The letter Á denotes [a] (front vowel) while A denotes the back vowel, and as Ŋ (engma) is not just an allophone of N as in Finnish, it needs a separate letter.
Possible variants may be found for Č/č, Š/š, and Ž/ž, in which they are written as (respectively): Ć/ć, Ś/ś, and Ź/ź. Sometimes, Á/á is written instead as À/à.
Grammar
Northern Sami is an agglutinative, highly inflected language that shares many grammatic features with other Uralic languages.
Pronouns
The personal and possessive pronouns have three numbers - singular, plural and dual. The following table contains personal pronouns in the nominative and genitive 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 in various cases:
| Singular | Dual | Plural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | son | soai | sii |
| Genetive | su | sudno | sin |
| Accusative | su | sudno | sin |
| Inessive-elative | sus(t) | sudnos(t) | sis(t) |
| Illative | sudnji | sudnoidi | siggjiidi |
| Comitative | suina | sudnoin | siinguim |
| Essive | sunen | - | - |
Declension
There are 7 or 8 noun cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, inessive-elative, illative, comitative, essive and the rarely used abessive. The inessive-elative case functions as elative in the singular form of nouns and as inessive in the plural form.
