A long winter

A review of "A Grammar of Pite Saami" by Joshua Wilbur 

This is a book strictly for linguists or perhaps really serious “language nerds”. It's also available on the web. Pite Sami (or Pite Saami) is an almost extinct Sami language spoken by 30 people in the Arjeplog municipality in the southern part of Swedish Lapland. The area is also known as Pite Lappmark.

The Sami (often called Lapps in English) are the native inhabitants of northern Scandinavia, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. They speak about 10 different but closely related languages, all of which belong to the Uralic language family (which also comprise Finnish and Hungarian). The largest Sami tongue is called Northern Sami. As already indicated, Pite Sami is one of the smallest. Most Sami in Pite Lappmark speak Swedish, but there is also pressure from Northern Sami, which is promoted by the Swedish government and local authorities, while Pite Sami is not.

This book isn't a general introduction to Pite Sami culture or history, but a detailed grammatical analysis of their language, so brace yourself for some heavy scholarly terminology! Here is a typical sample: “With the exception of the glottal fricative /h/, there is a length distinction for all consonants (singleton and geminate pairs). There are both voiceless and preaspirated plosive and affricate phonemes. Geminates and preaspirated segments are restricted to footmedial position. Vowel length is only distinctive in open front position. Linear morphology in Pite Saami is exclusively suffixing. However, grammatical categories are often expressed non-linearly as well. This can take the form of foot-internal consonant alternations, umlaut in the first vowel of the initial foot, and regressive vowel harmony between both vowels of a foot.”

Well, at least you don't have to learn Pite Sami to read this work! For the effort (the winters are long in Arjeplog), I will give Joshua Wilbur's grammar five stars, although most of it was all Greek to me.