Written production
Domain focus
Written production asks you to write short, functional Inari Sámi: a greeting card, a personal message, a form entry, a brief description of a familiar person or place, or a simple invitation. Marks come from communicative adequacy, correct spelling and diacritics, appropriate case endings, verb agreement, and register. You are not expected to write long essays; you are expected to control a small set of model patterns accurately.
Core rules
- Learn whole phrases for openings and closings, and keep them fixed.
- Match the case ending to the function: subject, object, location, direction, source, possessor.
- Check verb person and number against the subject; do not omit the negation verb.
- Use the standard orthography consistently, including marks on vowels and consonants.
- Keep sentences short and link them with simple conjunctions; accuracy beats complexity.
- Choose greetings and terms of address that fit the reader.
Worked example
Task: write three sentences introducing yourself and saying where you are from. Model: 'Tiervâ! Mun lam Aanaarast. Mun ...' Reason: the greeting opens the message; 'Mun lam' supplies 'I am'; the place name takes the ending used for 'from' in the model, not the bare nominative. Before submitting, check that every noun has the ending its role requires and that the verb agrees with 'mun'. If you do not know a word, paraphrase with a simpler sentence rather than inventing a form.
Traps
- Writing Finnish or English word order and translating word for word.
- Omitting diacritics because they are hard to type; this changes words.
- Using the nominative after a construction that requires a case.
- Forgetting the negation verb or letting the main verb agree instead.
- Overwriting: a short correct message scores better than a long unclear one.
- Mixing formal and informal address in the same note.