Talk:Sámi languages

Cheremiss and Votyak
QUOTE: Languages from the Finno-Ugric languages group, spoken by the Saami people of Lapland. Two of which are Cheremiss Votyak /QUOTE Sorry, guys Cheremis is another name for Mari language and Votyak - another name for Udmurt language. They are NOT Saami languges for sure. I am deleting this paragraph. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vassili Nikolaev (talk • contribs) 17:34, 15 August 2002 (UTC)

Saami Languages
Would Saami languages be more a more suitable name for this article than Saami language? Crusadeonilliteracy 18:58, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Indeed. I redirected Sami Language to Sami Languages.--Kulkuri 13:31, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sami place names
User:Node has been adding "native american" names to articles on north american places (cities, states, etc). I think it would be very useful to add Sami names to places in northern Scandinavia. I don't know any Sami languages, so I can't help, but I did find a page with a large list of places with "official" and Sami names.

Particularly important are the places where the Swedish / Norwegian etc name has been derived from the Sami name, or when the Sami name is widely used. In those cases, it would be appropriate to mention the Sami name close to the introduction. Example:


 * Luleå (from Lule sami, Luleju), ...

If the name is not widely used, it may not be appropriate to include it in the introduction. It is then better to add a paragraph talking about the Sami names for the area.

Anyway, this was my idea. Do with it what you will.

- David Remahl 10:38, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Grammar vs orthography
''The Northern Sami dialect has had more than one grammar, but in 1948 a common grammar was created. It was last modified in 1985.''

''The Lule Sami dialect has a 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 English word "song". Instead of n-acute (found in Unicode, but not in ASCII), many use ñ or even ng.''

Surely, it should be orthography, not grammar? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.167.179.53 (talk) 08:48, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Northern Sami open vowels
In the section on Northern Sami's orthography, we find the wonderfully ambiguous utterance:


 * a-acute (Á/á) /aː/ (front vowel; notice the contrast between the back vowel [ɑ] and the front vowel [æ])

Does this mean we have three phonemes, /æ/=[a̝]-ish, /aː/=[aː] (and not the central [a̠ː] commonly implied by the glyph), /ɑ/=[ɑ]? Or is it saying that /aː/=[æː] and not [ɑː]? Is it saying something entirely different? Unfortunately a brief search with Google was of no help. (If anyone knows anything about the phonology of this language, please add it to Northern Sami language! Something's better than nothing, I'd think!

—Felix the Cassowary ( ɑe hɪː jɐ ) 11:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Geographic Distribution Map
With a bit of effort, someone could make the numbers on the Geographic Distribution correspond to the specific languages mentioned in the article. I'm not that person; I know nothing about the distribution... which is why I'm proposing it. Thanks. --12.119.210.194 20:17, 23 June 2006 (UTC)


 * It would also be nice if someone could modify the map such that it did not cut off the easternmost parts of the Kildin and Ter areas.Labongo 16:45, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Also, the map does not include three Norwegian municipalities that have Sami as an official language. How does on upload images of a correct map/ where can you find out how to upload images a correct map? --Misha bb (talk) 16:47, 7 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Found it out, and uploaded the new image. note to self: search around more before asking others to help you). (talk)Added three municipalities (Snåsa, Tysfjord and Porsanger) and remade the borders of the already existing municipalities to better match the real borders. It's not completely accurate, though, of course.--Misha bb — Preceding undated comment added 13:53, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Number of speakers
I did some cleaning up, and tagged the speaker statistics of the various languages with fact tags. Does anyone have an idea which sources are the most reliable and up-to-date? There are plenty of references about with speaker statistics, but my impression is that these often just tend to repeat the figures in earlier references, and it is difficult to trace what these are ultimately based on. --AAikio 22:03, 3 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Do you think this http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/fu.html could be used? Labongo 13:09, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Regulated by
Are the Sami languages regulated by the Norwegian Sami Parliaments language department (Sámi giellaossodat), formerly known as the Sami language board (Sámi giellaráđđi)? If so, the infobox should be changed. If not, could someone please explain what is required for a language to have an "official regulation"?Labongo 13:24, 2 May 2007 (UTC)


 * No, as they are not all contained within Norway. -Yupik 09:01, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

History section
This section is poorly written, doesn't actually address the language history, only the language shift, which is not really relevant to the Sami Languages since these of course are all subsequent to this language shift. Before the shift there were no Sami Languages, rather there were "the unidentified languages of the people now known as Sami, whose name then is unknown". Furthermore the section has only one researcher's material as a source, so how can we know if it's regarded as consensus theory or fringe theory or just one view among many by the body of researchers in the field? New theories shouldn't be put in without first describing what earlier theories or consensuses they deviate from or oppose. --AkselGerner (talk) 21:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

To the history section, as far as I know only very few linguists nowadays date the seperation of Proto-Finnic and Proto-Sami languages as late as to 1000 B.C. to 700 A.D.. In example, the Finnish language article says the date to be around 1500–1000 BCE. The article should make more clear that the estimated date varies alot, in example some linguists say the date to be around the date of the agriculture reaching Finland. --Lihapulla1 (talk) 10:50, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Names of countries
Do the Sami languages have names for the countries in which they are found? (Norway etc.) These could be interesting to add here as well as to the country articles. --Hordaland (talk) 11:58, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? They are already mentioned. --JorisvS (talk) 12:09, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes we have, Norway - Norga. Sweden - Ruoŧa. Russia - Ruošša. Finland - Suopma. sources: Mŧself, I am a sami. --Mrrminister (talk) 15:24, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Language map
Would it be possible to get a map on this page, similar to the one on the "norwegian language" article? One colour for the areas where it is a majoirty, another colour for the minority areas. --Mrrminister (talk) 15:18, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

lapp 'patch'
This perhaps might be unrelated (though it also might not — it is, in fact, one of the proposed etymologies for Lapp the ethnonym), but I gathered the point of including this comment was to demonstrate one reason why "Lapp" might be found disparaging. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 23:34, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 5 March 2019

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Not moved. (non-admin closure) samee  converse  18:59, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Sámi languages → Sami languages – The page was moved previously, but in the discussion that followed, there appeared to be no consensus for the move. Therefore, I ask that the prior status quo be restored. Rua (mew) 17:34, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Cf. User talk:Red Slash. I asked for reversions under WP:RMUM but they did not take place. Dekimasu よ! 15:09, 6 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Oppose without an analytical rationale that is entirely specific to this exact subject. See WP:NOT. The prior, multi-page RM made it clear that the articles should be moved or not, individually, on the basis of usage in reliable sources. This gives us a choice between Sámi, Sami, and Saami for the language family, but no argument has been presented by the nominator for any of these.  Also, a WP:CONSISTENCY argument would be bogus; part of the reason the prior, mass RM did not come to a consensus on using any consistent spelling is that the individual languages, cultural groups, organisations, and other topics with some variant of this word in their names receive different majority spellings in the sources.  An artificial consistency cannot be imposed against real-world facts; that's a form of WP:OR, and it's why my own attempt to make them all use a consistent spelling was an error; simply flipping them back to a different consistent spelling is a two-wrongs-don't-make-a-right error.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:28, 9 March 2019 (UTC) Update: Oppose even more strongly now: The RS on languages clearly show a majority in favor of Sámi over Sami or Saami for the language-family topic.  Seemingly uniquely in Google's search processing, doing a quoted search with a diacritic at Google Scholar in particular will net just the version with the diacritic, while doing the same search without it nets results both with and without the diacritic, but not the same material that was returned by the search with the diacritic (other Google searches seem to simply treat such characters as identical across the board). If you use the diacritic search, you get about 870 hits (exact numbers may depend on your Google settings), almost all of them in English, since the search phrase was "Sámi languages" OR "Sámi language family" ; if you do the search without the diacritic ("Sami languages" OR "Sami language family"), you get about 990 results . In checking the first ten pages of those results (at 10 hits per page), you find that at least 10 of those returned by the no-diacritic search actually do use the diacritic, so that's a 10% diacritic rate in the material that was expected to be diacritic-free. Shifting the totals (i.e. moving ~100 hits), you end up with about 970 diacritic vs. 890 anti-diacritic.  Even if it were an even split, we would use the diacritic, since WP doesn't suppress diacritics when RS tell us they properly belongs in a name, because we know that various publishers in English jingoistically suppress diacritics on purpose. PS: I suspect that the search discrepancy is a matter of the exact character encoding (e.g. a Unicode á is likely being parsed differently than, say, a Windows Code Page á, or á done as an HTML character entity, with only one of these being treated as synonymous with a by the search processor).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:53, 9 March 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Removed an incorrectly cited passage (Aikio never said it) and placed here: Saami likely has over one thousand substrate words from the Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate languages. --Vihelik (talk) 10:17, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Finno-Permic
There was this earlier commit by

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=S%C3%A1mi_languages&oldid=1023085131

Finno-Permic actually refers to "Saamofinnic-Permic" (including the Saami branch, and regardless whether it is a child of "Finno" or a sibling). This is just for clarification of the commonly used historical linguistic reconstructions, I'm not saying that we need it in the article. But it would be correct to have Saami under Finno-Permic, and both – recursively – under Uralic. Rießler (talk) 12:22, 18 May 2021 (UTC)