Sámi languages
The Sami languages are languages from the Finno-Ugric languages group, spoken by the Sami people of Lapland.
In 2001 there were around ten known Sami languages. Six of these have a standard written language, the four others are literally not in use – i.e. there are fewer than 100 people that speak them. The six written languages are:
- Northern Sami (Norway, Sweden, Finland)
This accounts for probably more than 75% of all Sami speakers in 2002. There have been a number of grammars for this dialect, but in 1948 a common grammar was created, and was last modified in 1985. It uses seven characters not found in Scandinavian or Finnish:- a-acute (Á/á)
- c-caron (Č/č)
- d-stroke (Đ/đ)
- eng (Ŋ/ŋ)
- s-caron (Š/š)
- t-stroke (Ŧ/ŧ)
- z-caron (Ž/ž)
- Lule Sami (Norway, Sweden)
Common grammar but with fewer special characters (only a-acute and n-acute). The character n-acute (Ń/ń) is the eng sound found in the Norwegian word "sang". Instead of n-acute (found in Unicode, but not in ASCII), 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.
- Inari Sami (Enare Sami) (Inari, Finland)
This dialect uses seven special characters.
SIL code: LPI, ISO 639-2: smi
- Skolt Sami (Näätämö and the Nellim-Keväjärvi districts, Inari municipality, Finland, also spoken in Russia, previously in Norway; Skolts were resettled to Inari from the Petsamo area after its annexation by the Soviet Union)
SIL code: LPK, ISO 639-2: smi
- Kildin Sami (Kildin Island, Russia)
Uses cyrillic typesetting, Russian characters with some special characters.
SIL code: LPD, ISO 639-2: smi
The remaining living 4 Sami languages have very few speakers and are in danger of extinction. It is believed that they have fewer than 500 speakers combined. They are Akkala (Babino) Sami, Ter Sami, Pite Sami and Ume Sami. Another Sami language, Kemi Sami, has been extinct for over 100 years.