North Sami And Lule Sami Key Language Differences Explained
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Many people mistakenly think Sami is just a single language.
It’s actually a diverse family of several distinct languages spoken across northern Europe.
North Sami and Lule Sami are two of the most prominent languages in this group.
While they share common linguistic roots, they have distinct differences in spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.
Understanding these structural differences is highly beneficial if you’re trying to decide which language to learn.
Table of Contents:
Geographic and speaker differences
North Sami is the most widely spoken of all the Sami languages today.
It currently has an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 native speakers.
You’ll primarily hear North Sami spoken in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
Lule Sami has a much smaller active community of speakers.
There are only about 1,000 to 2,000 people who speak Lule Sami fluently.
This language is primarily spoken around the Lule River valley in Sweden and the adjacent areas in Nordland county, Norway.
Because they’re geographically neighboring languages, they form a dialect continuum.
This simply means that speakers who live very close to the linguistic border can often understand each other without much effort.
Alphabet and spelling differences
The writing systems of these two languages look very different at a quick glance.
North Sami uses a Latin alphabet combined with several unique special characters.
These unique North Sami letters include Á, Č, Đ, Ŋ, Š, Ŧ, and Ž.
Lule Sami uses a more standard Latin alphabet that’s heavily influenced by Norwegian and Swedish orthography.
Instead of using special letters for specific sounds, Lule Sami relies heavily on consonant combinations.
For example, the North Sami letter Č sounds like “ch” in English.
Lule Sami represents this exact same sound by writing the letters “tj”.
Similarly, the North Sami letter Š is written as “sj” in Lule Sami texts.
Here’s a quick comparison of how the two alphabets handle certain phonetic sounds.
| Sound | North Sami | Lule Sami |
|---|---|---|
| ”ch” sound | Č | tj |
| ”sh” sound | Š | sj |
| ”th” sound | Đ or Ŧ | d or t |
Vocabulary and greetings
The everyday vocabulary between these two languages has noticeable variations.
Basic greetings are a great way to see these vowel shifts in action.
If you want to say hello in North Sami, you use the word bures.
In Lule Sami, the standard greeting is buoris.
Bures.
Buoris.
The word for “thank you” also shifts slightly between the two languages.
Giitu.
Gijto.
These small vowel and consonant shifts are incredibly common across the entire vocabulary of both languages.
Grammar and case systems
Sami languages are highly inflected, meaning words change their endings based on their role in a sentence.
These specific word endings are called grammatical cases.
North Sami officially relies on six grammatical cases.
Lule Sami is slightly more complex in this specific grammatical area.
Modern Lule Sami utilizes seven distinct grammatical cases.
One major difference is how the two languages handle physical locations.
North Sami combines the concepts of “in”, “at”, and “from” into a single grammatical case called the Locative case.
Lule Sami keeps these locational concepts strictly separated into two distinct cases.
It uses the Inessive case to say “in” or “at”, and the Elative case to express “from”.
This means Lule Sami learners have to memorize slightly more noun endings to accurately express location.
