Inari Sami people Inari Sami people Inari or Aanaar Sami are a group of Sami people who inhabit the area around Lake Inari, Finland. They speak the Inari (Aanaar) Sami language, which belongs to the eastern Sami languages. There are an estimated 700–900 ethnic Inari Samis in Finland, of whom approximately 300 speak Inari Sami. They are the only group of Sami who live within one state and one municipality. Inari Sami are indigenous peoples of their area. The traditional homeland of Inari Sami is the shores of the Lake Inari and the surrounding areas. Historically they are believed to have inhabited a
Inari Sami language not assigned to a foot. In Inari Sami, however, two important changes in the early development of Inari Sami have changed this structure, making the prosodic rhythm quite different: Consequently, Inari Sami distinguishes prosodically between words that originally ended in a vowel but have undergone apocope, and words that already ended in a consonant in Proto-Samic. This rearrangement of the foot structure has an effect on the length of vowels and consonants. Inari Sami is written using the Latin script. The alphabet currently used for Inari Sami was made official in 1996 and stands as follows: The phonetic values are