Sámi

Sámi is the Uralic branch spoken by the indigenous Sámi across Sápmi, in ten or more languages of which Northern Sámi is the largest. Proto-Sámi took shape near the Gulf of Finland in the last millennium before Christ and spread north and west during the Iron Age, reaching central Scandinavia by about AD 500.

The languages fall into western and eastern groups, while more southerly varieties died out under the advance of Finnish and Karelian farming settlement, Kainuu Sámi disappearing in the eighteenth century. Written Sámi began with Protestant missionary work, when the Swedish and Lappish ABC Book appeared in 1638 with prayers and catechism in a regular Sámi form.

Knud Leem published the first grammar in 1748, and in 1832 Rasmus Rask's reasoned Sámi grammar provided the phonemic notation on which the later Northern Sámi orthography was built.