> Most Samis live in Norway. In Norway, the Germanic language there > borrowed the word S�pmi, S�mi, as "same" with an adjective "samisk". > In Finland, where there are not very many Sami speakers compared to > Norway, particular orthographic practices of that language write long > vowels with double letters, hence "saami".
I don't know how much the relative number of Sami speakers in Finland contributed to the spelling; my guess is that the "long vowel -> double vowel" rule was much stronger in this case. Any kind of diacritics very rarely survive when words are "finnishized" (made to agree with Finnish ortography) (In fact, I can't think of any examples right now where the diacritics would survive, but I'm certain there are counterexamples...)
