The Saami languages are languages from the Finno-Ugric languages group, spoken by the Saami people of Lapland.

In 2001 there were around ten known Saami languages. Six of these have a standard written language, the four others are literally not in use – i.e. there are fewer than 100 people that speak them. The six written languages are:

• Northern Saami (Norway, Sweden, Finland)
  This accounts for probably more than 75% of all Saami speakers in 2002. There have been a number of grammars for this dialect, but in 1948 a common grammar was created, and was last modified in 1985. It uses seven characters not found in Scandinavian or Finnish:
  • a-acute (Á/á)
  • c-caron (Č/č)
  • d-stroke (Đ/đ)
  • eng (Ŋ/ŋ)
  • s-caron (Š/š)
  • t-stroke (Ŧ/ŧ)
  • z-caron (Ž/ž)

• Lule Saami (Norway, Sweden)
  Common grammar but with fewer special characters (only a-acute and n-acute). The character n-acute (Ń/ń) is the eng sound found in the Norwegian word "sang". Instead of n-acute (found in Unicode, but not in ASCII), many use ñ or even ng.

• Southern Saami (Norway, Sweden)
  Written using Norwegian or Swedish characters, some variants of Swedish or Norwegian æ and ø.

• Inari Saami (Enare Saami) (Inari, Finland)
  This dialect uses seven special characters.
  SIL code: LPI, ISO 639-2: smi

• Skolt Saami (Näätämö and the Nellim-Keväjärvi districts, Inari municipality, Finland, also spoken in Russia, previously in Norway; Skolts were resettled to Inari from the Petsamo area after its annexation by the Soviet Union)
  SIL code: LPK, ISO 639-2: smi

• Kildin Saami (Kildin Island, Russia)
  Uses cyrillic typesetting, Russian characters with some special characters.
  SIL code: LPD, ISO 639-2: smi