PhD student Ryan Chon gave a talk entitled “Language contact effects of the northeast spread of reindeer pastoralism and North Saami” with Ante Aikio (University of Oulu) at the 7th Saami Linguistics Symposium (SAALS) at Nord University in Bodø, Norway on November 5.
Abstract: This presentation proposes a new theory of the historical development of the Eastern Inland dialects of North Saami in the Deatnu (Tana) River basin. We argue that the region was not originally North Saami-speaking, but was instead inhabited by speakers of a no-longer extant Saami variety closely related to present-day Aanaar (Inari) Saami. The Eastern Inland dialects emerged through language shift from this earlier variety to North Saami, leaving clear traces of substrate influence in both phonology and vocabulary. We connect this linguistic transformation to the northeastward spread of large-scale reindeer pastoralism during the late medieval period. We suggest that the new pastoral economy expanded into the Deatnu region from the southwest during the 14th and 15th centuries, bringing North Saami-speaking groups and creating powerful incentives for integration into emerging pastoral networks. As local populations adopted North Saami, features of the earlier language were retained in the resulting dialects. This scenario accounts for both the distinctive phonological and lexical profile of the Eastern Inland dialects and for the unusually wide geographic distribution of North Saami today.
