Northern Sámi


Northern Sámi is the most widely spoken of all Sámi languages. The area where Northern Sámi is spoken covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Geographic distribution

The number of Northern Sámi speakers is estimated to be somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000. About 2,000 of these live in Finland and between 5,000 and 6,000 in Sweden, with the remaining portions being in Norway.
Based on the highest estimates above of 18,000 speakers in Norway, and Statistics Norway estimating the total population of Norway to be 5,594,340 at the start of 2025, this gives the percentage of Northern Sámi speakers in Norway as approximately 0.32%. Similar calculations for Sweden and Finland give them as 0.05% and 0.03% respectively in those countries.

History

Among the first printed Sámi texts is Swenske och Lappeske ABC Book, written in Swedish and what is likely a form of Northern Sámi. It was published in two editions in 1638 and 1640 and includes 30 pages of prayers and confessions of Protestant faith. It has been described as the first book "with a regular Sámi language form".
Northern Sámi was first described by Knud Leem in 1748 and in dictionaries in 1752 and 1768. One of Leem's fellow grammaticians, who had also assisted him, was Anders Porsanger, himself Sámi and in fact the first Sámi to receive higher education, who studied at the Trondheim Cathedral School and other schools, but who was unable to publish his work on Sámi due to racist attitudes at the time. The majority of his work has disappeared.
In 1832, Rasmus Rask published the highly influential Ræsonneret lappisk Sproglære, Northern Sámi orthography being based on his notation.
No major official nationwide surveys on the distribution of speakers by municipality or county in Norway have been done. A 2000 survey by the Sami Language Council showed Kautokeino Municipality and Karasjok Municipality as 96% and 94% Sami-speaking respectively; should those percentages still be true as of the 2022 national population survey, this would result in 2,761 and 2,428 speakers respectively, virtually all of which being speakers of Northern Sámi. Tromsø Municipality has no speaker statistics despite having the largest voter roll in the 2021 Norwegian Sámi parliamentary election. A common urban myth is that Oslo has the largest Sámi population despite being nowhere near the core Sápmi area, but it had only the 5th largest voter roll in 2019.

Assimilation

The mass mobilization during the Alta controversy as well as a more tolerant political environment caused a change to the Norwegian policy of assimilation during the last decades of the twentieth century.
In Norway, Northern Sámi is currently an official language in Troms and Finnmark counties along with eight municipalities. Sámi born before 1977 have never learned to write Sámi according to the currently used orthography in school, so it is only in recent years that there have been Sámi capable of writing their own language for various administrative positions.
In the 1980s, a Northern Sámi Braille alphabet was developed, based on the Scandinavian Braille alphabet but with seven additional letters required for writing in Northern Sámi.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Northern Sámi is large, contrasting voicing for many consonants. Some analyses of Northern Sámi phonology may include preaspirated stops and affricates and pre-stopped or pre-glottalised nasals. However, these can be treated as clusters for the purpose of phonology, since they are clearly composed of two segments and only the first of these lengthens in quantity 3. The terms "preaspirated" and "pre-stopped" will be used in this article to describe these combinations for convenience.
Notes:
  • Voiceless stops have voiced or partly voiced allophones when they occur adjacent to voiced sounds, and sometimes also word-initially.
  • Stops before a homorganic nasal are realised as unreleased stops. Some, particularly younger, speakers instead realise voiceless stops as a glottal stop in this position, and decompose voiced stops into a homorganic nasal + glottal stop combination.
  • is realised as a labiodental fricative in the syllable onset, and is realised in the syllable coda as before a stop in quantity 2, as bilabial otherwise in quantity 2, and as before a stop in quantity 3. Although is a fricative, it behaves phonologically like an approximant, in particular like.
  • Quantity 3 geminated plain stops and affricates are variously described as voiced or partly voiced.
  • Voiceless sonorants are very rare, but occur more frequently as allophonic realisations. A combination of sonorant followed by in the coda, is realised as the equivalent voiceless sonorant. Voiceless only occurs this way, and is quite rare.
  • A combination of followed by a stop or affricate in the onset is realised as preaspiration.
  • is extremely rare.
  • is realized as when it is between two unstressed syllables.
  • The pronunciation of the cluster varies between,, and depending on dialect.
  • can be pronounced.

    Dialectal variation

Not all Northern Sámi dialects have identical consonant inventories. Some consonants are absent from some dialects, while others are distributed differently.
  • Western Finnmark lacks, using in its place. This also applies to sequences of pre-stopped and, which become and respectively. is retained before a velar consonant, but as an allophone of.
  • Eastern Finnmark does not have voiced pre-stopped nasals, replacing them with voiceless equivalents.
  • Sea Sámi does not have pre-stopped nasals at all, having geminate nasals in their place.
  • The postaspirated stops do not occur in Western Finnmark dialects, plain stops are used instead. They occur only in recent loanwords from the Scandinavian languages, and only before a stressed syllable when not next to another consonant.

    Consonant length and gradation

Consonants, including clusters, that occur after a stressed syllable can occur in multiple distinctive length types, or quantities. These are conventionally labelled quantity 1, 2 and 3 or Q1, Q2 and Q3 for short. The consonants of a word alternate in a process known as consonant gradation, where consonants appear in different quantities depending on the specific grammatical form. Normally, one of the possibilities is named the strong grade, while the other is named weak grade. The consonants of a weak grade are normally quantity 1 or 2, while the consonants of a strong grade are normally quantity 2 or 3.
  • Quantity 1 includes any single consonant. It originates from Proto-Samic single consonants in the weak grade.
  • Quantity 2 includes any combination of consonants with a short consonant in the coda of the preceding syllable. It originates from Proto-Samic single consonants in the strong grade, as well as combinations of two consonants in the weak grade.
  • Quantity 3 includes any combination of consonants with a long consonant in the coda of the preceding syllable. It originates from Proto-Samic combinations of two consonants in the strong grade.
Throughout this article and related articles, consonants that are part of different syllables are written with two consonant letters in IPA, while the lengthening of consonants in quantity 3 is indicated with an IPA length mark.
Not all consonants can occur in every quantity type. The following limitations exist:
  • Single is restricted to quantity 1, and does not alternate.
  • Postaspirated consonants do not occur after a stressed syllable, and thus do not have any quantity distinctions.
  • Voiced stops and affricates only occur in quantity 3. In quantity 1, voiced stops are allophones of the corresponding voiceless stops.
  • , and occur in quantity 2 and 3, but not in quantity 1.
When a consonant can occur in all three quantities, quantity 3 is termed "overlong".
In quantity 3, if the syllable coda consists of only, or, the additional length of this consonant is realised phonetically as an epenthetic vowel. This vowel assimilates to the quality of the surrounding vowels:
  • Between two rounded vowels in the adjacent syllables, it becomes.
  • Before a front vowel in the next syllable, it becomes, e.g. muorji, phonetically.
  • Otherwise, it becomes, e.g. silba, phonetically.
This does not occur if the second consonant is a dental/alveolar stop, e.g. gielda, phonetically, or sálti, phonetically.

Vowels

Northern Sámi possesses the following vowels:
Closing diphthongs such as also exist, but these are phonologically composed of a vowel plus one of the semivowels or. The semivowels still behave as consonants in clusters.
Not all of these vowel phonemes are equally prevalent; some occur generally while others occur only in specific contexts as the result of sound changes. The following rules apply for stressed syllables:
  • Short,, and, the normal diphthongs, and the long vowel occur generally.
  • The other long vowels occur only in the context of diphthong simplification.
  • Short is rare, and mostly occurs due to the combination of diphthong simplification plus stressed vowel shortening.
  • Rising diphthongs and half-long occur only due to unstressed vowel shortening in the next syllable.
The distribution in post-stressed syllables is more restricted:
  • Short and long, and occur generally.
  • Short and occur more rarely, sometimes from Proto-Samic *i and *u and sometimes as a result of unstressed vowel shortening.
  • Short and occur only before.
  • No diphthongs occur at all, nor do half-long or long and.
In a second unstressed syllable, no long vowels occur and, and are the only vowels that occur frequently.
The standard orthography of Northern Sámi distinguishes vowel length in the case of versus , although this is primarily on an etymological basis. Not all instances of are phonemically long, due to both stressed and unstressed vowel shortening. Some dialects also have lengthening of under certain circumstances. Nonetheless, a default length can be assumed for these two letters. For the remaining vowels, vowel length is not indicated in the standard orthography. In reference works, macrons can be placed above long vowels that occur in a position where they can be short. Length of and in a post-stressed syllable is assumed, and not indicated, except in the combinations and, where these letters can also indicate short vowels.