Kola Sámi
The four Kola Sámi languages belong to the group of East Saami languages; the other subgroups of Saami are Central Saami (spoken in the northern parts of Finland, Sweden and Norway) and South Saami (spoken in Central Scandinavia), each of which includes several languages.
A characteristic of the phonology of the Saami languages is the occurrence of preaspirated voiceless stops and affricates [ʰp, ʰt, ʰk, ʰʦ, ʰʧ]. The noun phrase structure is strictly head-final, including the (predominant) occurrence of postpositions instead of prepositions. However, in the verb phrase there is a strong tendency to shift from SOV to SVO word order. Negation is expressed by means of an inflected negation auxiliary followed by the non-finite main verb in a special connegative form. The Saami languages are agglutinating (and exclusively suffixing) but show a strong tendency towards fusional structure due to the morphologization of (originally phonologically triggered) stem mutations in vowels (metaphony or umlaut) and consonants (stem gradation or stem alternation). This tendency away from agglutination becomes most noticeably apparent in the Kola Sámi languages.