Introduction

Tor sent me the following e-mail this morning:

Hello,

We were just chatting about languages and stuff over lunch, and a friend of mine said he would like to know where the sami language connects on the tree of languages. Could I possibly talk you into writing an article about that?

-Tor

I began writing an e-mail back explaining that, while I could write an article, I'd feel like a bit of a fraud since what I know myself could be summed up in one sentence – and all the rest of the information would come directly from wikipedia. I was going to suggest that Tor refer his friend to the wikipedia articles on the Sami language family and the wider Finno-Ugric language family.

However, I then started writing an "in a nutshell" summary, which ended up being long enough for an article after all (although most of the information about the languages and the families into which they're classified does still come from wikipedia). I then realised I ought to include a short explanation of what language families actually are and what it means to say that two languages are related. This doesn't all come from wikipedia. So here, despite my original intentions, is an actual article about Sami and its linguistic relations.

What is Sami?

Sami is not, as is commonly supposed, a single language, but a family of 11* known languages. By far the largest (in terms of speakers) is Northern Sami at 20,700. The next largest (Lule Sami) has 2000. Three of them have fewer than 20 speakers and two are extinct.

*Be aware that the figures come from Ethnologue, which is a notorious "splitter" when it comes to questions of whether two speech varieties are separate languages or dialects of one language (e.g. German is apparently 19 different languages). So it may be that some linguists would group some of the 11 together and give a smaller number.

Historical and comparative linguistics

Before saying any more about language family trees, I should probably talk a little bit about what they mean. Linguists talk about "genetic relationships" between languages, but this has nothing to do with DNA. It means that the languages are descended from a single ancestor language (such as Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese from Old Norse), but not that its speakers are descended from a common human ancestor. Of course, DNA and languages usually go together, but the link can be broken (e.g. by the language of a conquering group becoming dominant in a region and replacing the language of the conquered, as in South America).

When the ancestor language isn't attested (known from historical written records), a hypothetical approximation of it can often be reconstructed using similarities between the more recent attested languages. This is known as a proto-language. Proving (or trying to prove) that two languages are related usually involves identifying correspondences and reconstructing a proto-language, which might look very different from any of the attested languages.

The tree model assumes that at some point in time, one older language split into two or more newer languages. This allows you to produce something that looks very like a human family tree, and we refer to parents, daughters and sisters (apparently in this metaphor languages are all female and procreate by parthenogenesis). This idea is somewhat artificial as language change is always gradual, and unless one group of speakers sends a colony across the ocean and doesn't hear from it again for centuries, the two sister languages will continue to influence each other all the time that they're supposedly splitting. The tree model works well enough if you're thinking in very long time periods, but things become extremely fuzzy if you look more closely. When talking about language families it's important to remember that the whole thing is an abstraction, and any number of linguists could each produce different results from the same set of hard data.

There is also a "wave" model of language change, which looks more like ripples spreading out from a place where a stone was dropped a pond. Nonetheless, the tree model is the most commonly used.

Sami's ancestry and relations

The closest relative to the Sami family is the Baltic-Finnic family, which comprises Finnish, Estonian and some minority languages in Russia such as Karelian. These two families together make up the Finno-Samic or Finno-Lappic family. (Wikpedia uses the term "Finno-Lappic", but since "Lapp" is sometimes considered pejorative the former name would seem more politically correct.) More distantly, this is part of the Finno-Ugric family, which includes Hungarian (much to the chagrin of some Hungarian nationalists, who for some inscrutable reason spend inordinate amounts of time trying to prove that their language is related to Turkish instead of Finnish) and a bunch of languages spoken in Siberia. This family is in turn related to the Samoyedic language family, spoken even further north and east in Siberia.

All of the aforementioned families together make up the Uralic language family, named after the Ural mountains and totalling about 25 million speakers between its 37 languages. The Uralic languages are not related to the Indo-European languages (unless you believe in Nostratic, which not very many linguists do, or in Proto-World**, which no-one except crackpots does).

**Before anyone gets too excited about Proto-World, it's an inherently unprovable hypothesis. The further back in time you go to find the point of origin, the fewer correspondences you would expect to see between related languages (and thus the shakier any theories are likely to be). Beyond about 5,000-10,000 years, the level of expected correspondence becomes the same as what you'd expect to see by chance in two unrelated languages, so it's impossible to rely on those correspondences to establish a relationship.

Conclusion

So now you know. Sami is not one language but nine (plus two extinct ones), and is related to Finnish, Estonian, and more distantly Hungarian, as well as some minority languages spoken in Russia, but not to Norwegian or English (as far as anyone has been able to prove). Now you can impress any Sami friends with your knowledge of their ancestral language. Just be prepared for a lot of hard work if you actually want to learn it, as you won't find many grammatical similarities with Norwegian or English to latch on to.