Research project Towards a grammar of spoken South Saami
This is Richard Kowalik's PhD project in linguistics. The project resulted in the first comprehensive description of South Saami since the 1940s.
This thesis project has resulted in a grammatical description of South Saami, a Uralic language traditionally spoken in central Sweden and Norway. South Saami has today around 500 speakers, many of whom live far from each other. The language has the status of an official language in Norway and is an officially recognized minority language in Sweden.
This is the first comprehensive description of South Saami since the 1940s and it is presented in the thesis Towards a grammar of spoken South Saami (2023).
Project description
Within this project, fieldwork were conducted between 2017 and 2020, resulting in a corpus of 35 hours of recordings. The speakers interviewed for this thesis are functional bilinguals with South Saami and either Norwegian or Swedish. Consequently, the language described here is the product of a long-standing contact with these languages.
The description is grounded in Basic Linguistic Theory and covers phonology, morphology and syntax. The phonological analysis presented in the thesis is the first modern comprehensive description of the sound system of South Saami together with various phonotactic relations as well as basic analyses of prosody. The part devoted to morphology covers the main word classes and their inflectional patterns. Form-function relationships are also discussed extensively in pertinent chapters. Topics typically related to syntax such as grammatical relations, simple and complex clauses are reviewed in detail. Word formation and two cross-linguistically universal domains such as questions and negation are treated in chapters of their own. The thesis concludes with two texts from the corpus, provided with morphological glossing and translation into English.