The earliest Southern Sámi grammar – in the broad sense – was published in 1738Fjellström, 1738. by Swedish teacher and minister Petrus Fjellström, meant for the clergy as an aid in the ministry.Bergsland, 1982.

Starting from the 1850s, the indigenous Sámi people of Scandinavia were the target of aggressive nationalization politics. A single national language was strictly enforced, and Sámi customs and culture outlawed. An official reckoning with the mistreatment of the Sámi people starts only in the late 1970s, slowly shifting the popular opinion. In 2024, national minority rights ensure people of Sámi heritage access to education and official communication in their mother tongue within the traditional Sámi territories.Berg-Nordlie, 2023.

The suppression of Sámi culture led the village elders of Giertsjávrrie (Swedish: “Bergnäs”) to unanimously stop teaching their children Ume Sámi in 1925.Ballovara, 2022.

By the late 1800s, most Ume Sámi speakers had assimiliated into Swedish and Norwegian society.Theil & Knutsen, 2022. The number of Ume Sámi speakers have been in rapid decline for a long time, leading UNESCO to classify the language as “critically endangered”.UNESCO, n.d. From 2000 to 2007, the number of speakers dropped from twenty to ten – all of them above 65 years of age and all living along the Ume River in Sweden.Theil & Knutsen, 2022.

Recents efforts to revive the Ume Sámi language is well underway. Katarina Barruk, a Ume Sámi woman from Storuman, was awarded the title “young Sámi artist of the year” at the 2012 Riddu Riđđu festival in Norway.Dunfjeld-Mølnvik & Norvang, 2022. In 2022, Norwegian national broadcaster NRK reported that ten students from Norway and Sweden had recently completed a master levels education in Ume Sámi.NRK, 2022.

In 1992, Lantmäteriet – the Swedish Mapping, Cadastral and Land Registration Authority – in Gävle approached the Sámi associations to help map the Sámi territories. The project necessitated a consistent spelling of the 4 000 Ume Sámi place names, prompting the formation of a working group in Árviesjávrrie under the name ”Vuöbmie och Geäddie”. Their proposed orthography was approved by Lantmäteriet in 1998.Kanaanstiftelsen, 2007.

A slightly revised version of this orthography can be seen in Daniel Z. von Gertten’s 2015 master’s dissertation, Huvuddrag i umesamisk grammatik, from the University of Oslo.Von Gertten. 2015

A revised proposal was finally approved by the Samí parliamentary council on 6 April 2016,Samien Giallagalddije, 2016. and made widely available through Henrik Barruk’s 2019 dictionary.Barruk, 2019.