Missing Link: A Corpus of Archival and Contemporary Ume Saami

The aim of the Missing Link Project is to close a significant gap in our understanding of the Saami languages, as the state of knowledge and documentation of Ume Saami is severely insufficient. Initially the cornerstone of the Saami literary language in Sweden and a central object of early Saami linguistic research, Ume Saami has been seriously overlooked in the 20th century. Most of our current knowledge of Ume Saami is based on the dialect of a single speaker documented by Wolfgang Schlachter in the 1940s in Máláge/Malå. Schlachter's dictionary and text collection (1958) has remained the only extensive collection of Ume Saami textual materials. Primary textual materials from other dialects of Ume Saami have remained unpublished. Due to our insufficient knowledge of Ume Saami and its dialects, its relation to other Saami languages such as South Saami, Pite Saami and Lule Saami is still unsettled. Although Ume Saami has been historically spoken both in Norway (Nordland county) and Sweden (Västerbotten and Norrbotten counties), the language has been documented only in Sweden. Today, Ume Saami is the most endangered of Sweden's five Saami languages and the absence of representative and accessible materials is also an obstacle for language revitalization. The project intends to compile a language corpus that will make more materials available for further linguistic studies as well as for the Ume Saami speech community. The corpus will contain transcriptions of archival sound recordings of Ume Saami as spoken in the latter part of the 20th century. The electronic corpus will be designed multilingually so that both the Ume Saami community as well as the international research community can benefit from primary data for their individual purposes. The project also intends to produce a printed collection of Ume Saami texts and edited archival manuscripts as well as research papers based on new data on this underdescribed indigenous language of Scandinavia.

The aim of the project "Missing Link: A Corpus of Archival and Contemporary Ume Saami" is to close a significant gap in our understanding of the Saami language chain, as the state of knowledge and documentation of Ume Saami, the Saami vernacular historically spoken in the Åsele, Ume and Pite lappmarks and the adjacent areas of the Västerbotten and Norrbotten counties of Sweden and the Nordland county of Norway, is severely insufficient. Until recently, Ume Saami has been almost synonymous with the idiolect of Lars Sjulsson as documented by the German researcher Wolfgang Schlachter in the 1940s in Máláge/Malå. Schlachter's publication in 1958 has remained the only extensive collection of primary materials so far. Primary textual materials from other dialects of Ume Saami have remained unpublished. Due to our insufficient knowledge of Ume Saami and its dialects, its position in the Saami language chain is still unsettled. Today, Ume Saami is the most endangered of Sweden's Saami languages and the absence of representative materials is also an obstacle for language revitalization too. The result of the project is a corpus that will make primary materials for further grammaticographical and lexicographical exploration available. It will contain transcriptions of archival sound recordings and spontaneous narratives representing contemporary Ume Saami. The corpus will be designed multilingually so that both the Ume Saami community as well as the international research community can benefit from the primary materials for their individual purposes.