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The Corpus of Written Kildin Saami

Kildin Saami belongs to the peninsular subbranch of East-Saamic and is used in daily communication by less then 100 speakers today.

Kildin Saami used to be spoken in the central inland parts and the central coastal parts of the Kola Peninsula, but the original Kildin dialect areas have fragmented, chiefly as the result of forced centralization to larger towns. A Cyrillic-based orthography for Kildin was developed during the 1980s. Although the number of Kildin Saami writers is very small, Standard Written Kildin Saami has been used in prescriptive dictionaries and other teaching materials, in literature for children and adults and even in social media.

The texts contained in the corpus represent different genres of Standard Written Kildin Saami and are taken from published teaching materials and literature as well as from other sources. The corpus contains fairy tales, poetry, prose and non-fictional texts.

Scrambled sentences from the corpus will be made available in Korp (https://korp.csc.fi/).