Lule Sami language

Lule Sami (julevsámegiella) is a Uralic, Sami language spoken in Lule Lappmark, i.e. around the Lule River, Sweden and in the northern parts of Nordland county in Norway, especially Tysfjord municipality, where Lule Sami is an official language. It is written in the Latin script, having an official alphabet.

Status

With 1,500 to 2,000 speakers it is the second largest of all Sami languages. It is reported that the number of native speakers is in sharp decline among the younger generations. The language has, however, been standardised in 1983 and elaborately cultivated ever since.

Grammar

Cases

Lule Sámi has seven cases:

Nominative

Like the other Uralic languages, the nominative singular is unmarked and indicates the subject of a predicate. The nominative plural is also unmarked and is always formally the same as the genitive singular.

Genitive

The genitive singular is unmarked and looks the same as the nominative plural. The genitive plural is marked by an -j. The genitive is used:

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.