Northern Sami is spoken by about 30,000 people. The largest of the Sami languages, and about three quarters of all Sami speakers.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Finnish, Ukrainian and Serbian. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, verbs usually come before their objects; words are built from many smaller pieces, which our course teaches piece by piece.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Northern Sami sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, 1,682 patterns so far, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 1,027 hours of study. Read how it works.
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded; the difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.