or '''North Sami''' (also written '''Sámi''' or '''Saami'''; formerly '''Lappish''' or '''Lapp''') is the most widely spoken of all ,
Sweden and
Finland . Depending on the survey, this estimate can bring the population of North Sami speakers to be somewhere between 15,000 speakers and 25,000 speakers.
Northern Sami is an agglutinative, highly inflected language that shares many grammatic features with the other
Uralic Languages . Sami has also developed considerably into the direction of fusional and inflected morphology, much like Estonian. Therefore, cases are marked also by modifications to the root, not only suffixes.
The personal pronouns have three numbers - singular, plural and
Dual . The following table contains personal pronouns in the nominative and genitive/accusative cases.
The next table demonstrates the declension of a personal pronoun ''he/she'' (no gender distinction) in various cases:
There are 7 noun cases:
Nominative ,
Genitive ,
Accusative ,
Locative ,
Illative ,
Comitative and
Essive .
Northern Sami is written in an extended version of the
Latin Alphabet .
Possible variants may be found for Č/č, Š/š, and Ž/ž, in which they are written as (respectively): Ć/ć, Ś/ś, and Ź/ź. Sometimes, Á/á is written instead as À/à. These are considered orthographic errors.
