Ter Sámi
nearly extinct Uralic language
Ter Sámi is the easternmost of the Sámi languages. It was traditionally spoken in the northeastern part of the Kola Peninsula, but now it is a moribund language; in 2004, only ten speakers were left. By 2011, the number of speakers had decreased to two. Other estimates counted about 30 Ter Sámi speakers in Murmansk Oblast, as well as in St. Petersburg, in 2007. The mean age of the youngest Ter Sámi speakers at that time was 50.
History
In the end of the 19th century, there were six Ter Sámi villages in the eastern part of the Kola Peninsula, Yokanga, Lumbovka, Ponoy, Sosnovka, Kuroptevsky, and Kamensky with a total population of approximately 450. In 2004, there were approximately 100 ethnic Ter Sámi of whom two elderly persons speak the language; the rest have shifted their language to Russian.
The rapid decline in the number of speakers was caused by Soviet collectivisation, in the 1930s, and the largest Ter Sámi village, Yokanga, was declared "perspectiveless" and its inhabitants were forced to move to the Gremikha military base.
Documentation
There are no educational materials or facilities in Ter Sámi, and the language has no standardized orthography.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ter Sámi” as nearly extinct Uralic language. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q36656. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2011 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ter Sámi” 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.