Reconstructing Old Literary Southern Saami

The aim of the project is to provide a linguistic description of Old Literary South Saami (OLSS; in Swedish: sydlapska bokspråket). The language is a literary language which was used predominantly in religious contexts from the middle of the 18th century until the late 19th century. It was constructed mainly on the basis of Ume and Pite Saami dialects, but it also displays features from Lule and South Saami.

OLSS was a central part of Sweden's colonial policy in Sami areas and was intended to be used in as many of the Saami-speaking areas of Sweden as possible.

There are about 11,000 pages of OLSS texts, based on which the project will create an annotated corpus, a comprehensive lexicographic database, and a modern, linguistic description of OLSS in the form of a grammar book. The resulting knowledge about the language will be used to develop natural language processing for automatic corpus annotation. This comprehensive linguistic description will also address change over time and variation between different texts, thus filling a gap in the knowledge of Saami language history and aiding in understanding how linguistic material from Saami dialects has been chosen and adapted to create this standard language.

The OLSS texts, which are printed in Fraktur, will be transliterated into a modern typeface and made available for the public in an easily readable format accessible via the internet, and the annotated corpus will also be openly accessible for further research.