| Summary: | The present study captures a case of language variation in the verbal system of Aanaar (Inari) Saami, namely that of the conditional perfect, which can be expressed by two periphrastic constructions. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to give a diachronic description of the Aanaar Saami conditional perfect and (2) to investigate whether its variation can be considered to be ‘free’ or whether it is explainable by intra- and extralinguistic determinants. The data consists of language samples gathered in 1887 and 1952, the Aanaar Saami text corpus and a survey carried out in 2020. The diachronic comparison indicates changes in the variation which are, among others, discussed in the light of linguistic interference and Aanaar Saami’s recent revitalisation.
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