Grammatical and lexical competence
Domain focus
Grammatical and lexical competence is tested through discrete items and through your own production: case use, verb person and number, tense, negation, consonant gradation, derivational patterns, and everyday vocabulary. Inari Sámi is a synthetic Uralic language, so endings carry much of the grammar. The exam rewards control of a small core of high-frequency patterns rather than rare forms.
Core rules and concepts
- Nouns and adjectives inflect for case and number; learn the whole form with its ending, not just the dictionary stem.
- Location and direction are expressed by cases, not by standalone English prepositions.
- The negation verb agrees with the subject; the main verb appears in a non-finite form.
- Consonant gradation can change the stem between nominative and inflected forms; learn pairs.
- Possessive meaning can be carried by suffixes and/or pronouns; follow the model.
- Vocabulary clusters for the Basic level: family, home, food, weather, seasons, reindeer, school, health, travel.
Worked example
Item: choose the form meaning 'from Inari' in a sentence. Reason: first identify the place name Aanaar; then ask which case marks source or origin. The bare nominative is the name as listed, not 'from'. Select the form with the source ending shown in your course model, and check that the stem has not undergone an unexpected gradation. If two options differ only by a diacritic, treat the diacritic as meaningful.
Traps
- Memorising nominative forms only and guessing at inflected forms.
- Translating 'from', 'in' and 'to' as separate words.
- Forgetting that the negation verb agrees with the subject.
- Ignoring consonant gradation and choosing a form that looks like the dictionary entry.
- Overgeneralising a case ending to a noun class that does not take it.
- Learning rare vocabulary before the high-frequency core.