The Structure of North Saami

Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen, 2023

Review of: Skåden, Asbjørg (ed.). 2022. Márkku sánit. Ravda Lágádus. (Android app.)

Dick Smakman & Patrick Heinrich (eds.): Globalising Sociolinguistics: Challenging and Expanding Theory, 2015

2012

Tiina Äikäs (ed.), Máttut - máddagat: The Roots of Saami Ethnicities, Societies and Spaces / Places, pp. 30-45. Publications of the Giellagas Institute 12. Oulu., 2009

Marianne Bakró-Nagy, Johanna Laakso & Elena Skribnik (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages, 2022

South Saami, an indigenous language spoken in the central regions of Norway and Sweden, is the westernmost variety of the westernmost (Saami) branch of the Uralic language family. Despite its long history in the immediate neighbourhood of Scandinavian languages, many of the core features of South Saami stand out as constituting a typologically unusual mixture that distinguishes the language from most western Uralic languages. Such features include, for example, a predominantly SOV word order and the marginal role of the copula. Within the Saami language chain in particular, the most remarkable feature of South Saami morphophonology is the complex metaphony in nominal and verbal inflection, while the consonant gradation typical of other Saami languages is absent in that language.

In: Casper de Groot (ed.), Uralic Essive and the Expression of Impermanent State. Typological Studies in Language 119. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins., 2017

This chapter presents an empirical study of the distribution of a morphological case labelled as the ‘essive’ in North Saami. The description of the properties of this case follows the linguistic questionnaire that captures the contexts in which essive and/or translative markers may occur in the Uralic languages. The study specifically investigates the opposition between permanent and impermanent state in non-verbal predications. The linguistic domains involved are non-verbal main predication, secondary predication, complementation, and manner, temporal, and circumstantial adverbial phrases. The use of the marker in the essive sense (associated with state) is contrasted with its use in expressing the translative sense (associated with change). Finally, the syntactic position of elements marked by this form is discussed in relation to the position of focus constituents.

The paper discusses a little-studied morphological phenomenon in North Saami. North Saami is a suffixing language, but at the same time one of the most fusional within the Uralic family, with remarkable variation and irregularity in and across the inflectional paradigms and derivational processes. The focus is on occasional instances in which bound morphemes show looseness in phrases where two representatives of the same inflectional or derivational form are coordinated: Word pairs like the negative converbs bora-keahttá ja jugakeahttá [eat-NEG.CVB and drink-NEG.CVB] 'without eating and (without) drinking' may be replaced by phrases like bora-ja juga-keahttá [eat and drink-NEG.CVB] where the first member of the phrase undergoes conjunction reduction usually reserved for compounded words. It is shown that almost twenty inflectional and derivational disyllabic suffixes are able to behave in a similar way. It is proposed that the "degrammaticalization drift" in the language can be explained by the fact that in a relatively fusional language, the remaining non-fusional disyllabic suffixes are prone to be perceived as word-like morphemes rather than as bound morphemes. Nearly all of them have long suffixal roots in Saami, and the debonding phenomena can thus be regarded as extraordinary counterevidence to the unidirectionality hypothesis.