List of English words of Sami origin
Encyclopedia
English words of Sami
Sami languages
Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...

 origin are relatively rare, having usually entered the English language via some other language.

Words loaned to English

Some words specific to the arctic environment have been loaned to English, specifically: (archaic) "morse" (walrus
Walrus
The walrus is a large flippered marine mammal with a discontinuous circumpolar distribution in the Arctic Ocean and sub-Arctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. The walrus is the only living species in the Odobenidae family and Odobenus genus. It is subdivided into three subspecies: the Atlantic...

) ← Sami morša (via Slavic), "tundra" ← Kildin Sami
Kildin Sami language
Kildin Sami is a Sami language spoken by approximately 600 people on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia...

 tū̄ndra "of the treeless plain" (via Russian). In Kildin Sami, the word for tundra
Tundra
In physical geography, tundra is a biome where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term tundra comes through Russian тундра from the Kildin Sami word tūndâr "uplands," "treeless mountain tract." There are three types of tundra: Arctic tundra, alpine...

 is tūndâr, tūndra is in the genitive case
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...

.

See also

  • Sami languages
    Sami languages
    Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...

  • List of English words of foreign origin
  • List of English words of Finnish origin
  • Uralic languages
    Uralic languages
    The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...

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