Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently (and erroneously) believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami languages: Saami, Sámi, Samic, Saamic, as well as the exonyms Lappish and Lappic. The last two are, along with the term Lapp, considered derogatory by many...
more
Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently (and erroneously) believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami languages: Saami, Sámi, Samic, Saamic, as well as the exonyms Lappish and Lappic. The last two are, along with the term Lapp, considered derogatory by many.
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 Baltic-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 has been earlier assumed, and that the similarities may stem from an areal influence on Sami from Baltic-Finnic.
In terms of internal relationships, the Sami languages are...
less
