South Sámi
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South Sámi
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  • Please provide some background information about this language. Where is it spoken? What communities speak this language? Is this language endangered?
  • What are the names of the people who built this dictionary? Whose voices are in this dictionary?
  • Where did the data in this dictionary come from? Please describe if you collected the data yourself. If you used any published reference sources, please list them.
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This dictionary is a work in progress, and new entries will be added throughout 2024 and possibly into 2025.

South Saami (Åarjelsaemien gïele) is a Uralic language spoken in Norway and Sweden. According to the Arctic University of Norway, South Saami has just over 500 native speakers, equal to less than 2% of the estimated total number of native speakers of Saami languages overall.

I am Southern and Ume Saami. When I first encountered the wealth of information on South Saami in 2020, I learned that I had before me the unique opportunity to draw on these materials and create an extensive, heavily researched English dictionary for South Saami. These materials do, however, also contain Ume Saami words that I plan on also creating a smaller Living Dictionary for in the future.

In order to begin with this endeavor, I first spoke with the copyright holder and publisher of the source materials for their blessing. I then consulted heavily with personal connections in the Saami community in general, and the South Saami community in particular, to see if they would be willing to assist me in the creation of a freely accessible, non-monetized dictionary. Having received consent from everybody whom I approached, I started working in February of 2021, and finished in August of 2022. I expect to upload the entire dictionary to this platform by the end of 2024, by which time it should have over 20,000 entries.

My primary source for this Living Dictionary was Gustav Hasselbrink's German-South Saami Südlappisches Wörterbuch, which contains a wealth of highly detailed definitions and regional variations for given words. However, as this dictionary was written with archaic terminology and orthography, I referred to Lajla Mattsson Magga's Norsk-sydsamisk ordbok to ensure that the spelling in this Living Dictionary is compliant with modern South Saami spelling.

Credit for this dictionary goes to Anna H., Vegard H., Ylva EHM, Mika JG, Juss Nigá, Michael Rießler, Annika Palm, and Björn Lundqvist, who assisted me with any questions that I had concerning terminology and grammar in the source materials, as well as how to properly translate confusing terms into English. Anna Luisa Daigneault of Living Tongues has also worked tirelessly to assist me in importing the entries.