ABSTRACT
The Saami are an aboriginal people who have their traditional settlement area in northern Scandinavia and on the Kola Peninsula in north-western Russia. They have never had a state of their own, and today the Saami area is divided among the states of Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Saami is a Finno-Ugric language and thus very different from the Indo-European languages of Russian, Swedish and Norwegian, which are the majority languages of three of the countries where the Saami live. On the other hand, the Saami language is related to Finnish, which is the majority language of Finland. However Finnish and Saami are not so closely related as to be mutually comprehensible.
