Inalienability in North Saami On the basis of corpus data (9.5M words 1997–2010) we claim that North Saami is developing a grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable possession. In previous work we documented a language change in North Saami in which the possessive suffix as in girjji-id-easkka [book-acc.pl-3pl] ‘their books’ is being replaced by an analytic construction with the ...