Northern Sámi (davvisámegiella)

1. Introduction & endangerment status

Northern Sámi (davvisámegiella, or simply sámegiella) is a Uralic language of the Finno-Ugric branch and the largest member of the Sámi language family — it accounts for roughly nine in ten Sámi speakers. It is spoken by the Indigenous Sámi people across the north of three countries: Norway, Sweden and Finland (the cultural region often called Sápmi or Lapland). It is a close relative of the other Sámi languages and a more distant cousin of Finnish and Estonian.¹ Confidence: High.

Estimates of speakers generally range from about 20,000 to 25,000. UNESCO classifies Northern Sámi as 'definitely endangered' — meaning children are largely no longer learning it as a mother tongue in the home, even though it is far more vital than its smaller Sámi siblings (such as Skolt, Inari, Ume, Pite or Ter Sámi), several of which are severely or critically endangered. All Sámi languages are listed in the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.¹² Confidence: High.

Northern Sámi has comparatively strong institutional support. In Norway it is an official language in two counties and several municipalities; in Kautokeino (Guovdageaidnu) and Karasjok (Kárášjohka) roughly 90% of people speak it. It is taught from kindergarten to university level, used in local administration, and carries a daily newspaper, Ávvir. That support makes it one of the most learnable endangered languages.¹ Confidence: High.

This guide rises through the eight CEFR sub-levels, from the alphabet (A1.1) toward reading Sámi media and literature and joining the language community (B2.2). Each level is marked with a visible heading.

Northern Sámi is written in the Latin alphabet with several special letters. The current orthography descends from Rasmus Rask's 1832 system, built on the principle of 'one letter per sound'; a unified spelling for all three countries was adopted in 1979 and lightly revised in 1985. The language is written fairly phonetically, and doubled letters mark longer sounds.¹ Confidence: High.

The distinctive letters are č, đ, ŋ, š, ŧ and ž, plus the vowel á. Note that á tends toward a long, open 'a' in western dialects and toward 'æ' in eastern ones. A famous detail of connected speech: a word-final t may be dropped when the word sits inside a sentence (so dat 'it/that' can lose its t mid-phrase).¹ Confidence: High.

A first set of greetings. When you shake hands you say bures, and the other person replies bures bures. These open almost any conversation with a fellow learner or community member.³ Confidence: High.

The Northern Sámi numerals one to ten are listed below. From eleven to nineteen the digit takes the suffix -nuppelohkái (e.g. oktanuppelohkái '11'), and the tens are the digit plus logi 'ten' (guoktelogi '20', golbmalogi '30', …). One hundred is čuođi and one thousand duhat.⁴ Confidence: High.

Northern Sámi default word order is subject–verb–object, but, like its Uralic relatives, it is an inflecting and agglutinating language that marks grammatical roles on the word rather than by position. There is no grammatical gender and there are no articles. Nouns inflect for a system of cases — including nominative, genitive, accusative, illative ('into'), locative ('in/from'), comitative ('with') and essive — and for singular and plural.¹ Confidence: High.

The signature feature of Northern Sámi morphology is consonant gradation: the consonant(s) in the middle of a word alternate between a 'strong' and a 'weak' grade depending on the grammatical ending attached. This affects both nouns and verbs and is highly systematic but elaborate — learning the gradation classes is the central task of the intermediate learner. Many endings also trigger predictable vowel changes in the stem.¹ Confidence: High for the existence and centrality of gradation; learners should work through a graded grammar for the full classes.

Verbs conjugate for person and number in present and past tenses, with compound tenses built using the verb 'to be' (leat). Distinctively, Northern Sámi keeps a dual number — a separate set of forms for exactly two people — alongside singular and plural, in both pronouns and verb agreement (for example, a 'we two' that is grammatically distinct from 'we more than two'). Negation uses a conjugated negative verb together with a fixed form of the main verb, a pattern shared across Uralic.¹ Confidence: High.

Advanced competence means handling dialect variation (notably the western/eastern split heard already in the vowel á) and the specialised vocabularies of Sámi life — most famously the elaborate terminology for reindeer, snow and herding, which reflects the culture's deep relationship with the Arctic landscape. Centuries beside Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish have also left loanwords and shared turns of phrase; recognising borrowed material helps you keep inherited Uralic structure clear.¹ Confidence: High.

At the top of the ladder, the living language community is the classroom. Northern Sámi has a daily newspaper (Ávvir), radio and television from the national broadcasters' Sámi services, a vigorous music scene (the joik vocal tradition, and artists who blend it with modern genres), and a growing modern literature. The Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino teaches in the language. Reading goals at this level include Sámi news, fiction and poetry, supported by the strong online dictionaries and corpora maintained at the University of Tromsø (Giellatekno).¹ Confidence: High.

Learning resources

• Northern Sámi language and alphabet (Omniglot)A1–B1 — alphabet, pronunciation & official status
• How to count in Northern Sámi (Languages and Numbers)A1–A2 — full numeral system, sourced from UiT Giellatekno
• Sámi languages (Wikipedia)Background — the family, speaker numbers & endangerment levels
• Ságastallamin — the Sámi languages (UiT)Background — academic overview from the Arctic University of Norway

Revitalization & preservation

Northern Sámi is the success story of the Sámi family relative to its endangered siblings: official status in parts of Norway, education from kindergarten to university, a daily newspaper, broadcast media, and well-built digital tools (dictionaries, spellcheckers and corpora from UiT's Giellatekno). The continuing challenge, reflected in UNESCO's 'definitely endangered' label, is securing mother-tongue transmission to children across all three countries, including in towns far from the core Sámi-speaking municipalities.¹²

Downloadable resources

A spaced-repetition vocabulary dataset for this guide (17 verified, sourced entries) is available below in four formats. Each row carries the target word, English translation, an example sentence and its translation where one is documented, an (empty) audio placeholder, notes, and a category for beginner-first review. Only items that could be reliably sourced are included; no vocabulary has been invented.

• Vocabulary — CSVAll levels — spreadsheet-friendly
• Vocabulary — TSVAll levels — tab-separated
• Vocabulary — Anki text importAll levels — tab-separated Anki import
• Vocabulary — Anki deck (.apkg)All levels — ready-to-import APKG