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<P align="justify"> The history of a language is our knowledge of its past and its relationship to other languages ({{Artikkelilinkki|0119|language relationship}}). The history of the Saami language revolves around its relationship with earlier stages of the Finnish language and the attempt to reconstruct a common source for the Uralic languages. There are two alternative theories about the so-called original home of Proto-Uralic. According to the theory of restricted original homes, the Uralic language family probably originated geographically in central Russia around the bend in the Volga. There, within a relatively small area, several languages of the Uralic family, which in the course of history have become considerably differentiated from one another, are still spoken today. This is taken to indicate that the region was the ancient centre from which the whole language family expanded. This theory, which assumes that a language family has a centre and a periphery, is also supported by the fact that in the central area a large number of linguistic innovations seem to have taken place, while on the periphery, to which the language family rapidly spread, many original features (such as the dual number) have been preserved. Other scholars favour the idea of a so-called extensive original home, according to which Saami settlement and concomitantly the Saami language have been situated in their present location for several thousand years, and perhaps ever since the end of the Ice Age. The common characteristics and linguistic features of the language family would, according to this theory, have been a result of the influence of contact between the languages at different times. On the basis of what we can discern from later closely related languages (such as the Saami languages) and their differentiation from one another, the former theory seems the more likely one. However, this does not imply that there were actual migrations of peoples from the bend in the Volga, only a movement of the language. The conflict between the unique genetic make-up of the Saami people and the clear linguistic relationship with Finnish has not yet been satisfactorily explained.</P>
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