Missing Link: Korpus av eldre og nyere umesamisk

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 Primary textual materials from other dialects of Ume Saami have remained unpublished.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.