Introduction to the Sami Languages 

A little fact that makes Sami languages even more interesting: tons of vocabulary in each of these languages have dark or unknown etymologies that doesn't correspond to other Uralic words, and thus, it's quite likely that a remarkable percentage of Sami vocabulary is of older Neolithic people living in Europe before the spread of the Uralic people and the Indo-Europeans

I'm a sami and my ancestors come from the ume region. I am currently looking to learn ume sami since today about 10 people are able to speak it fluently and I really don't want it to die! thank you for making such a good video on my people and bringing awareness :)

It's so sad that so many of these languages are dying or dead, I hope they can make a comeback in the future. Every time a language dies we lose a set of data about how human language works, and as someone very interested in linguistics, I hate to see that happen.

in a study in 2018 it was found that inari had grown to 400 speakers due to revival efforts.

Shaming native speakers of minority languages is common around the world. I call it “linguicide”. All the Celtic languages have suffered from it in their homelands as well as abroad. While it has pretty much stopped for most Celtic languages, Breton is still under that kind of pressure, where the French government still refuses to support any language other than Standard French. In parts of Canada, French was subject to the same pressure, as were all the First Nations languages, though that has changed somewhat, and some native languages now have degree of government support, though not much.

I wish there were more videos made about the other Uralic languages!

5:00 Just a side note. In Norway the sami language and Norwegian are equitable and not just a minority language. In the regions in Norway you mentioned , the Sami language are official language. Every signs on the roads and official buildings and so on the Sami will come first and then Norwegian.

Thank you for this, I know a lot of Sami religion and practices, but not enough about history or the language. My grandmother and great grandfather were native Sami, who came from Finland to the U.S. My father had known of his Finnish roots, and some of his Sami roots, but never embraced them, only ever embracing his father's side, of Scottish descent. My sisters and I were raised still with Sami traditions, holidays, and religion. In 2018, he decided to take a DNA test, finding out that his father was never his real father. Both my father and I have even further done research into our ancestors, looking into records and tape recordings of my great grandfather speaking in Sami and Finnish. Now, my dad at 70+, he is starting to learn about himself as a native Sami, and I really admire that. We are currently learning Finnish together to go to the town in Finnland that my Grandmother and Great-grandfather were born.

My grandfather(a native north Sami) grew up in the Finnmark region of Norway; in 1945, nazi-Germany burned down his home village to slow down the advancement of Soviet forces in the region, he later recalled that the Soviets treated the people there better than the Norwegians after the war. His family were forced to live in extreme poverty after the war, and his native language of north Sami was banned. The poverty this still effects him today, he puts extreme value in all his things, and his feet are still damaged from wearing too small shoes. However, he lives a good life now, at age 80, he loves to go for walks and to pick berries. Despite his troublesome past, he still has a great sense of humor.

Ter Sami has so little speakers its scary

As a Swede I want to learn Ume sami. I think it's only fair that I learn a sami language since they have to learn swedish. And I don't want the Ume version to go extinct. Does anyone know the best way to go about it, since I doubt it will show up on duolingo anytime soon.

At us in Russia in districts there is no such practice in general. It does not even exist in all the Republics. For example, in Karelia the karelian and vepsian languages are also not official. In the only republic in Russia. We are fighting for this right, but everything is stagnant.

My grandfather was Sami. My family is from Lule. I still have his knives used for reindeer..

Great video. As a native speaker of Estonian I definitely recognise some cognates, but most words are elusive. Consonant gradation exists in the other Uralic languages aswell. E.g the word for "bird" in Finnish: "lintu", in Estonian: "lind". The genitive case of these words are "linnun", and "linnu", respectively. nt -> nn.

7:45 Finnish language has Šš and Žž. Those letters are not commonly used and almost always dropped from alphabets, but they still are included in Finnish orthography. The most common Finnish words to have Š in them are Tšekki, šekki, šokki and šakki. For example, Ž is used in Azerbaidžan, Fidži and džonkki. Yes, Ž is very useful yes. Ps. Nice job with background work and I think that pronunciation went pretty well even I don't speak any Sami, but heard it (mainly Northern Sami) in the news or internet. I have met them as well :)

Eine sehr interessante Sprache. Ich reise oft nach Schweden und habe in Jokkmokk viel über Samis gelernt. Ich bewundere diese Leute und ihre Liebe zur Natur. Ich habe viel Respekt.

It's interesting to hear someone with a north-american accent speaking saami so well x)

Unbelievably impressive video making. For a long time I thought quality language channels on RU-vid were only NativLang and Langfocus. Nothing against them (I’m the “this is a banger” guy on all of Paul’s videos). So refreshing!

WOW that was a treat! I didn't expect so much detail.

Very interesting, complete and well summarized. Thank you ! Kiitos

The intro to that book is SPECTACULAR! Thank you, from this video I got exactly what I was looking for and even more!

There is a Sámi news repport in Norway, Sweden and Finland. (Its the same one in all countries) most sami people in norway live i Oslo btw. My great grandmother and great grandfather were of sami blood. At least my gret grandmother was really ashamed of her heritage but i am really proud of being a little sami. The sami people are the indiginous people of the areas displayed. In Norway they have usually lived of reindrer herding or fishing. Right as i write this comment i can hear the sami news (Oddssat) in the background.

The passage with the number of native speakers was truly heartbreaking to watch. I've just learned swedish quite fluently and am looking to the next language I wanna learn. I've been considering czech and polish but a sami language would perhaps make more sense, since I live in Sweden. Not in a sami-speaking area though - not yet.

Man, you are awesome!!!! I'm watching all your videos! You are very didactic. Please do more videos about those different and beautiful languages! :)

This was fantastic, thank you.

Thank you for this very instructive video. Great job, as usual.

Very interesting! Thanks for this video!

I really like this video! It does a nice job with the overview and mentioning the oppression they faced. Though I wish it would mention how (southern) Sapmi wasn't a monolingual Sami area before the oppression, as many foreigners seem to think. Both Germanic and Sami people have shared the area through the Iron age after all, just using different habitats. Norse people would live along the coast and the fertile valleys, while sami people would move between mountains, forests and coast.

All these alterations according to inflections and for other reasons seem pretty natural to a finnish speaker, as I am. Finnish has ones similar too. It's very easy to think these languages are related. Though I can't understand a word. To me it's much more foreign than the Savonian language (or dialect). But, keep it up!

Really great video thanks.I hope to learn more Sami.

the netflix christmas movie, klaus, inspired me to come here

Wtf, this dude actually knew what he was talking about!

I just watched the film Sami Blood (really good!) and became really interested in this, not really knowing about Sami people before

it's really astonishing how every language has it's own tone ! it has always amazed in a way . the tone of the sami language is very interesting and kind of seem difficult in order to get the accent right ! just listening to the native speaker kind of made me out of breath haha .

That was a wonderful introduction. I love the sound of the spoken and can hear the Nordic lift in the sentences. Marked me want to explore more. I am Swedish but have never been there.

Amazing explanation in such a short video.

Thanks! This was very interesting. I was well on my way to learning the language of my people, Northern Sami, a couple of decades ago, but there was not enough time. However, now I have the time and after seeing this I have the motivation too.

Amazing video, I learned a lot.

Love this video it gave me much details about my own language. I proudly speak north sámi.

so freaking fascinating.

Amazing video, huge huge thanks for that

Ah, this is great :D awesome!! Your accent is very nice and so is the pronunciation! I made videos about learning Northern Sami (but atm I'm not active due to finals, work, etc)

thank you for this video 🙏🏼

great work

wow amazing video, thank you a lot

Having Umi and South Sumi heritage,but has been lost living in Canada, I remembered growing up with my Great aunties and uncles that spoke at home..I couldn't believe after all these years I could identify our family language before it was revealed..isn't it amazing, family ties,history,language.even if you think it is lost...it is not.

Great job I subscribed!

I live in Porsanggu municipality to the northwest in Norway, at the top of the map. In Porsanggu we also have a second minority language which is recognized as an official language in the municipality. In out municipality the national language Norwegian is spoken together with North Sami and Kveni.

Klaus brought me here!

Tussen takk.Det varmeget godt å lærne

I am a biosfphere ambassador for Vindelälven-Juhttátahkka. After seeing this video I am convinced to learn Luleå sami and Ume sami. I have start to learn the words in Luleå sami.

I'm from northern norway, from a place where sami language is probably the strongest, with the most fluent speakers. And i gotta say it's dying rapidly, there's no denying that, even here in the biggest stronghold of the language there is! I mean the youngsters, they do speak sami but at the same time they don't, they only know the core of it, words that are used in the town and at home, that's it. All the words belonging to any part of the old culture, they're gone, words describing nature, winds, weather, waters, features, snow, animals and their behaviour, toolmaking and the list goes on and on. The best sami spoken is of elderly people around our town, who lives in very small villages and has done so their whole life, they still have the old way of speaking, at least some of it. I always learn "new" words from them, words you just don't hear anymore in our town. It's death is probably inevitable, maybe the very core will last for a while but the rest of it will be gone and already is.

it's very helpful thank you!

Pite sami got its official Orthography on the 20'th August 2019!

I read 2 books in Swedish language, sms från Soppero and Hej Vacker, in these 2 books the author narrated good about Same language and way of living. I really love them because of the books❤️❤️❤️

Great👍🏻👍🏻thnx for sharing

my uncle spoke kildin sámi and i might learn it

Thank you for sharing. Our language is also a dying language too. Our people have many dialects too but I'm as of now I'm unsure of how many dialect we have. I only know of 4 but other people of my kind from China told me that there are more than 4. Different dialect are hard to understand if you do not live with them.

13:44 "ii baljo maidege" sounds alot like "ei paljo mihtekää" which would be "not much anything" but with an odd dialect. i truly hope they will have their own nations one day.

it's really sad how my country has treated the Sami people for ages and i hope all of the other dialects will make a come back in the future. thankfully though the government here has changed a lot over the last 30 years, and they Sami people now have their own parliament in Northern Norway and TV uses both Norwegian and Northern Sami, and it seems to be working considering Northern Sami speakers is now growing in numbers!

i’m glad i’m not the only one who came from the movie Klaus lmao

Great, informative video. The passage read in Sami shows just how much it sounds like Finnish in terms of the relatively flat intonation, the creaky voicing, the syllabic patterns. The main difference is in sounds that are not used in Finnish, eg the sh sound.

Good job one this video, only thing to say is that on the part where you compare the word to say in the diffent languages. by speaking north sami, the words from south is very close to how i say sound (jietna) and kilden is very close to how i say greet (cealkit)

This is pressuring me to learn my native languages😅😅 Lule sámi and Meänkieli😁 I have to fight the colonization my ancestors suffered from!😤

Thanks from Brazil

Update: the sami languages native to Norway are now legally equal to Norwegian, meaning both the sami languages and Norwegian are official languages for the entire Kingdom. Also I know some pitesami speakers in my municipality Bodø/Bådåddjo/Buvvda just across the fjord from the city.

it saddens me whenever a language dies out, i hope their numbers start growing again

I grew up in the northest parts of Norway surrounded by saami culture so I can speak some and my oldest dog is named "Ailo" which means "the holy one", and I am now about to get a new dog who will receive a northern saami name as well to stay connected to the culture I grew up in☺️💖

One correction, the Skolt Sami also live in Norway, specially around the village of Neiden close to Kirkenes, within close proximity of Finland and Russia.

I’m 3.25% finnish, but I’m 24% Swedish with my ancestry being pinned to Norrbotten and northern Finland, so I’m just gonna assume that somewhere in there, I have at least 1 Såmi speaking ancestor, and I’d like to honor them by learning how to speak their language.

Would have been useful to use the International Phonetic Alphabet to show how similar they may sound.

A ray of hope: so long as these languages are preserved in written and spoken form (both of which are 100% possible today), they can be revived and retaught and relearned in the future, when society is ready. Just look at the number of excellent active SPEAKERS of Latin today.

I’ve been visiting Sápmi for 3 years now I want to learn Northern Sami are there any learning resources in english? Great video!

Also there used to be kainuu sámi that sadly died in the 1800

Wonderful video! Question: Is there a Sámi Sign Language or perhaps Sami sign languages? Or do most Sámi who speak a sign language use one of the southern manual languages?

As a Finn and a language nerd I'm really interested in learning some saami language, preferably inarinsaami. If someone reading this knows any sources for this purpose, please feel free to share them!

Slowly learning Sámi and finnish, just because my great-grandmother was Sámi and great-grandfather was finnish.

One thing is certain: that Sami flag is the coolest I have ever seen.

the languages lule, ume, pite is also the name of 3 swedish cities in the swedish north

11:05 damn your north sami is good, it was as good as mine.

I wish there would still be active native Sami speakers in more southern Finland nowadays

Who is interested in learning the Kildin Sami language?

The Sami are kind of the northern parallel of the Kurds: they're spread across four countries, and their languages are related to the national language of one of the countries (Persian for the Kurds and Finnish for the Sami), but not to the other three

I hope more people learn Sámi languages!

I made a map map of Sápmi in 1975 and one of Upmeje Sámi, but have no names on it yet. I also have a map of Bidun Sámi, with names

My grandmother was very devout. She would never curse. Except when the kids tore something down in the kitchen. Then she would yell at us in Sami. I asked my uncle what she said. He told me that she called us "Little cunt-spawns of Satan." How delightful!

Hello, this is Barbie. I am currently working on a play that has a segment talking about a word in the Sammi language that is “guovssahasah”. Is there any way you might be able to help me with the pronunciation of the word? I would really like to pronounce it correctly to respect the language(s).

Pepehands :'( As a Swede I really do appriciate the Sami language, didn't know it was this bad. :c

It appears you did more research on this video than all of your other videos, but unfortunately for less viewership :( Regardless, thank you for all your hard work.

Pite Lule And Ume Are also cities but you add an å at the end for example luleå

I’m interested in this language thanks to Netflix’s Klaus as I am dying to know what all the Sami people in it are saying

Could you do a video on my language Gaeilge/ the Irish language

I am watching this after randomly coming across a translation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid into one of the Sami languages… I just became super interested and wanted to know more - unfortunately, not knowing Finnish (I was researching Inari and Skolt Sami), I could find few resources in English. This video is a gem!! Thanks for uploading it! PS: The title of the book is “Jeäʹrmmpääʹǩǩ peiʹvvǩeʹrjj”… Those ǩ’s look super cool!

Could you make a video about the similarities between Same languages/culture, Mapuche folk in south america, and Malinke folk in Africa?

it's interesting how much like the nordic languages and Finnish they sound like. I wonder if there is a sort of sprachbund effect going on with the phonology

Inari Sami is not only the only Sami language exclusive to Finland, but also the only language exclusive to Finland.

As a swede it's a bit embarrassing how little I knew/know about the Sami languages. It sounds indistinguishable to Finnish for me, maybe a bit more chill.

Could you write how to say ''Yes friend"' in Sami language (NoRTH Sami) thank you very much .

5:40 that municipal map of Finland is pre 2006...

I know some basic self-taught Finnish, and the se languages resemble and sound very Finnic at some points; however, there are momentos when they seem nothing alike. Could it be because of a different amount of Germanic and Slavic influence?