Towards a grammar of spoken South Saami

• Main Author: Kowalik, Richard
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik 2023
• Subjects: South Saami; Saamic languages; grammar; phonology; morphology; syntax; language description; language documentation; fieldwork; heritage language; minority language; Åarjelsaemien gïele; grammatihke; Sydsamiska; samiska språk; grammatik; Sørsamisk; grammatikk; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik; Norway; saami
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-214095

This thesis is a grammatical description of South Saami, a Uralic language traditionally spoken in central Sweden and Norway. South Saami has today around 500 speakers, many of whom live far from each other. The language has the status of an official language in Norway and is an officially recognized minority language in Sweden. The speakers have been subject to various assimilation policies especially in the previous century. However, in recent times, the language has received substantive support and currently there are a number of revitalization initiatives. The language variety described here is the spoken language of older heritage speakers. Their language may differ from the emerging (written) standard language and contains many features that have not been described previously. This study is the first comprehensive description of South Saami since the 1940s. It is based on fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020, resulting in a corpus of 35 hours of recordings. The speakers interviewed for this thesis are functional bilinguals with South Saami and either Norwegian or Swedish. Consequently, the language described here is the product of a long-standing contact with these languages. The description is grounded in Basic Linguistic Theory and covers phonology, morphology and syntax. The phonological analysis presented here is the first modern comprehensive description of the sound system of South Saami together with various phonotactic relations as well as basic analyses of prosody. The part devoted to morphology covers the main word classes and their inflectional patterns. Form-function relationships are also discussed extensively in pertinent chapters. Topics typically related to syntax such as grammatical relations, simple and complex clauses are reviewed in detail. Word formation and two cross-linguistically universal domains such as questions and negation are treated in chapters of their own. The thesis concludes with two texts from the corpus, provided with morphological glossing and translation into ...