Degrammaticalization drift in North Saami

North Saami is a suffixing language, but one of the most fusional within the Uralic family, with remarkable variation and irregularity in and across the inflectional and derivational morphology. There are about 20 bound morphemes that show looseness in phrases where two representatives of the same inflectional or derivational form are coordinated: word pairs may be replaced by phrases where the first member of the phrase undergoes conjunction reduction, usually reserved for compounded words. The explanation for the “degrammaticalization drift” in the language is that non-fusional disyllabic suffixes are perceived as word-like morphemes. This phenomenon can be regarded as extraordinary counterevidence to the unidirectionality hypothesis.