About Northern Saami
The Saami Language
The Saami language (also known as Sami, Sámi, Sámegiella, and--perjoratively--Lapp) is in the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family ("North Sami"). Their grammar most closely resembles Finnish; however, their sentence structures have been heavily influenced by the Scandinavian languages--Swedish and Norwegian. Most Saami are bilingual, speaking both their indigenous language and the colonizer's.
The video below explains some differences between Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, and Saami) and Indo-European languages like English, Swedish, and Norwegian.
Northern Saami Dialect
What is called the "Saami language" is actually made up of nine mutually unintelligible dialects. Northern Saami, the most popular of these dialects with about 27,500 speakers, is used by about two-thirds of the Saami population--specifically, Saami living in northern Sweden, Finland, and Norway ("Sami Language"). The video below identifies and describes each of the nine dialects. Of particular interest is the extreme variation in speaker numbers among the Saami dialects. While Northern Saami has thousands of speakers, other dialects are moribund, or even extinct.