Sámi people
Finno-Ugric peoples
The Sámi (US: SAH-mee, UK: also SAM-ee; also spelled Sami or Saami) are the traditionally Sámi-speaking indigenous people inhabiting the region of Sápmi. Formerly known as Lapland, Sápmi encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Historically, the Sámi have been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders; however, these terms are exonyms, regarded as offensive by the Sámi, who prefer their own endonym. Their traditional languages are the Sámi languages, which are classified as a branch of the Uralic language family.
Traditionally, the Sámi have pursued a variety of livelihoods, including coastal fishing, fur trapping, and sheep herding. Their best-known means of livelihood is semi-nomadic reindeer herding. As of 2007, about 10% of Sámi were connected to reindeer herding, which provides them with meat, fur, and transportation; around 2,800 Sámi people were actively involved in reindeer herding on a full-time basis in Norway. For traditional, environmental, cultural, and political reasons, reindeer herding is legally reserved for Sámi only in some regions of the Nordic countries.
Etymologies
Sámi
Speakers of Northern Sámi refer to themselves as Sámit "the Sámis" or Sápmelaš "of Sámi kin," the word Sápmi being inflected into various grammatical forms. Other Sámi languages use cognate words.
“Sámi people” enters the record as finno-Ugric peoples. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sámi, people and Finno-Ugric can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48199. The Library of Congress control number is sh85074675. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sámi people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.