Kildin Sami language

Kildin Sami (also spelled Sámi or Saami; formerly Lappish) is a Sami language spoken by approximately 600 people on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. Kildin Sami is written using an official Cyrillic script.

Geographic distribution

The area around Lovozero has the highest concentration of speakers. It is the largest of the Eastern Sami languages by number of speakers. Its future, however, appears to not be as bright as that of Skolt Sami or Inari Sami because the language is used actively by only very few people today. The Sami languages closest to Kildin are Ter Sami and Akkala Sami. The latter is sometimes considered to be a dialect of Kildin Sami.

Writing system

Kildin Sami is written in an extended version of Cyrillic since the 1980s. The alphabet has three variants with some minor differences in certain letters, mostly in Ҋ vs. Ј and ’ (apostrophe) vs. Һ. Whereas the dictionary of Sammallahti/Khvorostukhina(1991) uses Ҋ and ’ (apostrophe), Kuruč at al. 1985 uses Ј and Һ. The third orthographic variant, used, e.g. by Kert (1986), has neither of these letters.

Sami languages

Sami /ˈsɑːmi/ is a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in Northern Europe (in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia). There are, depending on the nature and terms of division, ten or more Sami languages or dialects. Several names are used for the Sami languages: Saami, Sámi, Saame, Samic, Saamic, as well as the exonyms Lappish and Lappic. The last two, along with the term Lapp, are now often considered derogatory (Lapp in Swedish means patch or rag).

Classification

The Sami languages form a branch of the Uralic language family. According to the traditional view, Sami is within the Uralic family most closely related to the Finnic languages (Sammallahti 1998). However, this view has recently been doubted by some scholars, who argue that the traditional view of a common Finno-Sami protolanguage is not as strongly supported as had been earlier assumed, and that the similarities may stem from an areal influence on Sami from Finnic.