Akkala Sámi was a

Sámi language The Sámi ( ; also spelled Sami or Saami) are a Finno-Ugric-speaking people inhabiting the region of Sápmi (formerly known as Lapland), which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Murmansk Oblast, Rus ...

spoken in the Sámi villages of A´kkel (; ), Ču´kksuâl () and Sââ´rvesjäu´rr (; ), in the inland parts of the

Kola Peninsula sjd, Куэлнэгк нёа̄ррк , image_name= Kola peninsula.png , image_caption= Kola Peninsula as a part of Murmansk Oblast , image_size= 300px , image_alt= , map_image= Murmansk in Russia.svg , map_caption = Location of Murmansk Oblas ...

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

. Formerly erroneously regarded as a dialect of

Kildin Sámi Kildin Sámi (also sometimes known as ''Kola Sámi'', ''Eastern Sámi'', and ''Lappish'', though all of these are ambiguous) is a Sámi language spoken on the Kola Peninsula of northwestern Russia that today is and historically was inhabited by ...

, it has recently become recognized as an independent Sámi language that is most closely related to its western neighbor

Skolt Sámi Skolt Sámi ( , "the Sámi language", or , "the Eastern Sámi language", if a distinction needs to be made between it and the other Sámi languages) is a Uralic, Sámi language that is spoken by the Skolts, with approximately 300 speakers in ...

. Akkala Sámi was noted as extinct in the 2010

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger The UNESCO ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger'' is an online publication containing a comprehensive list of the world's endangered languages. It originally replaced the ''Red Book of Endangered Languages'' as a title in print after a ...

. Previously, it had been considered the most endangered Eastern Sámi language. On December 29, 2003, Maria Serginathe last fluent native speaker of Akkala Sámidied. However, as of 2011 there were at least two people, both aged 70, with some knowledge of Akkala Sámi.Scheller, Elisabeth; 2011; "The Sami Language Situation in Russia"; in ''Ethnic and Linguistic Context of Identity: Finno-Ugric Minorities''; Uralica Helsingiensia series, vol. 5; Helsinki; pp. 79–96. Remaining ethnic Akkala Sámi live in the village

Yona The word Yona in Pali and the Prakrits, and the analogue Yavana in Sanskrit and Yavanar in Tamil, were words used in Ancient India to designate Greek speakers. "Yona" and "Yavana" are transliterations of the Greek word for "Ionians" ( grc, � ...

. Although there exists a description of Akkala Sámi

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

and

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

, a few published texts, and archived audio recordings, the Akkala Sámi language remains among the most poorly documented Sámi languages. . One of the few items in the language are chapters 23–28 of the Gospel of Matthew published in 1897. It was translated by A. Genetz, and printed at the expense of the

British and Foreign Bible Society The British and Foreign Bible Society, often known in England and Wales as simply the Bible Society, is a non-denominational Christian Bible society with charity status whose purpose is to make the Bible available throughout the world. The Soc ...

. In the Russian 2020 census, 1 person still claimed knowledge of Akkala. Sami dialects and settlements in Russia map

Morphology

The following overview is based on Pekka (Pyotr) M. Zaykov's volume.Зайков, П. М. ''Бабинский диалект саамского языка (фонолого-морфологическое исследование)''. Петрозаводск: «Карелия», 1987. Zaykov's Uralic phonetic transcription is retained here. The middle dot ˑ denotes palatalization of the preceding consonant, analyzed by Zaykov as semisoft pronunciation.

Noun

Akkala Sámi has eight cases, singular and plural:

nominative In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...

genitive In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...

accusative The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...

partitive In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that indicates partialness. Nominal partitives are syntactic constructions, such as "some of the children", and may be classified semantically as either set partitives or entity partitives ba ...

dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...

illative In grammar, the illative case (; abbreviated ; from la, illatus "brought in") is a grammatical case used in the Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Hungarian languages. It is one of the locative cases, and has the basic meaning of "int ...

locative In grammar, the locative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases, together with the ...

essive In grammar, the essive case, or similaris case, (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case.O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller. "Morphology: The Analysis of Word Structure." Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. 6th ...

comitative In grammar, the comitative case (; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case that denotes accompaniment. In English, the preposition "with", in the sense of "in company with" or "together with", plays a substantially similar role (other uses of "with", l ...

and

abessive In linguistics, abessive (abbreviated or ), caritive and privative (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case expressing the lack or absence of the marked noun. In English, the corresponding function is expressed by the preposition ''without'' or by ...

. Case and number are expressed by a combination of endings and

consonant gradation Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation (mostly lenition but also assimilation) found in some Uralic languages, more specifically in the Finnic, Samic and Samoyedic branches. It originally arose as an allophonic alternation bet ...

: * Nominative: no marker in the singular, weak grade in the plural. * Genitive-accusative: weak grade in the singular, weak grade + ''-i'' in the plural. * Partitive: this case exists only in the singular, and has the ending ''-''. * Dative-illative: strong grade + ''-a'', ''-a͕'' or ''-ɛ'' in the singular, weak grade + ''-i'' in the plural. * Locative: weak grade + ''-st'', ''-śtˑ'' in the singular, weak grade + ''-nˑ'' in the plural. * Essive: this case exists only in the singular: strong grade + ''-nˑ''. * Comitative: weak grade + ''-nˑ'' in the singular, strong grade + ''-'', ''-'' or ''-'' in the plural. * Abessive: weak grade + ''-ta'' in the singular.

Pronoun

The table below gives the declension of the

personal pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...

s ‘I’ and ‘we’. The pronouns ‘you (sg.)’ and ‘(s)he’ are declined like , the pronouns ‘you (pl.)’ and ‘they’ are declined like . The

interrogative pronoun An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', ''who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most o ...

s ‘what?’ and ‘who?’ are declined as follows: The

proximal Standard anatomical terms of location are used to unambiguously describe the anatomy of animals, including humans. The terms, typically derived from Latin or Greek roots, describe something in its standard anatomical position. This position pro ...

demonstrative Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...

‘this’ and the medial demonstrative ‘that’ are declined as follows:

Verb

Akkala Sámi

verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...

s have three

persons A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...

and two numbers, singular and plural. There are three moods:

indicative A realis mood (abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Most ...

, imperative and conditional; the

potential Potential generally refers to a currently unrealized ability. The term is used in a wide variety of fields, from physics to the social sciences to indicate things that are in a state where they are able to change in ways ranging from the simple re ...

mood has disappeared. Below, the paradigm of the verbs ‘to walk’ and ‘to knit’ is given in the present and imperfect tense: The verb ‘to be’ conjugates as follows: Compound tenses such as perfect and

pluperfect The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time i ...

are formed with the verb in the present or imperfect as

auxiliary Auxiliary may refer to: * A backup site or system In language * Auxiliary language (disambiguation) * Auxiliary verb In military and law enforcement * Auxiliary police * Auxiliaries, civilians or quasi-military personnel who provide support of ...

, and the

participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...

of the main verb. Examples are ‘I have known’ from ‘to know’, and ‘(s)he had made’ from ‘to make’. The conditional mood has the marker ''-č'', which is added to the weak grade of the stem: ‘I would sew’, ‘you (sg.) would become tired’. As in other Sámi languages, Akkala Sámi makes use of a

negative verb Dryer defined three different types of negative markers in language. Beside negative particles and negative affixes, negative verbs play a role in various languages. The negative verb is used to implement a clausal negation. The negative predica ...

that conjugates according to person and number, while the main verb remains unchanged. The conjugation of the negative verb is shown here together with the verb ‘to begin’: The third person singular and plural of the verb ‘to be’ have special contracted forms and .

References

External links

*
KOLTAN- JA KUOLANLAPIN SANAKIRJA (Kola Sámi dictionary, includes Akkala)
{{authority control Sámi in Russia Eastern Sámi languages Languages of Russia Extinct languages of Europe Languages extinct in the 2000s