Where is Skolt Saami spoken?

Skolt Saami (sääʹmǩiõll) is an Uralic language, spoken in Finland, Norway and Russia. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

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  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Skolt Saami is spoken

Skolt Saami is spoken in 3 countries: Finland, Norway and Russia.

On the map, Skolt Saami is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Skolt Saami.

How many people speak Skolt Saami?

Wikidata gives about 420 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Nearly extinct. Glottolog lists it as nearly extinct: only a few elderly speakers are left.

Where Skolt Saami sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Skolt Saami as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Uralic
  2. Saami
  3. Eastern Saami
  4. Mainland Eastern Saami
  5. Skolt Saami

Related languages

Other languages in the Mainland Eastern Saami group:

More about Skolt Saami

Codes: ISO 639-3 sms, Glottolog skol1241. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Skolt Saami

Where is Skolt Saami spoken?

Skolt Saami is spoken in Finland, Norway and Russia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Skolt Saami?

Wikidata gives about 420 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Skolt Saami in?

Glottolog places Skolt Saami in the Uralic family, in the branch Saami, Eastern Saami and Mainland Eastern Saami.

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