If you look at a map of northeastern Russia, extending westward to Norway, you’ll see a giant peninsula. It arches over Finland and connects to Sweden and Norway, enclosing the Baltic Sea. Tracking eastward across the northern coast of the peninsula, there are various areas where different groups of indigenous people lived — and still do, for that matter. Some of those groups speak their own languages, and the Samí people are one such group. The language they speak (or spoke; there were fewer than 400 of them still there as of 2010) is Kildin Sami.
Kildin Sami is officially a highly endangered language, since so few people still speak it. Most of the population uses Russian, even though they may still know the native language. But the language has been documented reasonably well, so some things are known about it.
As languages go, Kildin Sami is not especially remarkable or unique, but in relation to English it has at least one small claim to fame. English, as everybody knows, borrows words readily from languages all around the world. And Kildin Sami may be the only language with exactly one word borrowed by English.
The English word borrowed from Kildin Sami is “tundra.” It first showed up in English in 1824, in the book Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary, written by John Dundas Cochrane. In the book, Cochrane spells it “toundra” — possibly because the word was borrowed by French first, in the late 1700s. There seems to be evidence that “tundra” entered French by way of Russian, and Russian acquired it from Kildin Sami.
Throughout its travels, “tundra” has always meant exactly the same thing, which was pretty clearly explained in 1841: “The most northern part of Siberia is a low plain, called the Tundra. The surface is nearly a dead level, and quite destitute of trees.” At least it’s only one thing, which keeps it simple enough — unlike that urban myth about native Alaskan people having 27 different words for “snow.”
