The little language lexicon: the Finnish language

The Finnish language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family. It is therefore closely related to Estonian, but also to Hungarian, which belongs to the same family. Other Finno-Ugric languages include Sami, spoken mainly in Lapland in northern Scandinavia, and Karelian, Erzya, Ludic, Votic and Livonian, which are spoken in neighbouring regions of Russia but are threatened with extinction.

Finnish differs greatly from most other languages spoken in Europe, which mainly belong to the  Indo-European language family. Not only the structure of the Finnish language is very different, but also its basic vocabulary. The Finno-Ugric languages are agglutinative languages, which is one of the biggest differences from the European languages of the Indo-European family. In agglutinative languages, grammatical functions such as person, tense or case are expressed by adding affixes rather than separate words. These affixes extend a root word but have no meaning on their own. So the Finnish word talo means "house", whereas taloissani means "in my houses". The composition can be explained as follows: talo "house" + i (plural) + ssa "in" + ni (indicates possession: "my").

The origins of written Finnish can be traced back to the Reformation. In 1524 King Gustav Vasa introduced Lutheran teachings as the state religion. This included the principle that the word of God should be preached in the language of the people. And so the first texts published in Finnish came from a student of Martin Luther: Bishop Mikael Agricola translated, among other things, the New Testament into Finnish.

After the Grand Duchy of Finland came under the rule of the Russian Tsar in 1809, the "Fennoman" movement developed, which sought to make Finnish a language of culture. The basic problem at the time was that the grammar had never been systematically recorded, and the vocabulary that had developed in the everyday life of the rural population was insufficient for administration and culture. The Fennoman movement eventually gave rise to Finnish-language literature. New words were mostly formed by modifying existing words rather than adopting loanwords, in keeping with the character of the Finnish national movement.

The Finnish alphabet is identical to that of Swedish and consists of the 26 Latin letters plus the special characters å, ä and ö.

Broadly, two kinds of dialect are distinguished in Finnish, though the differences between them are very small. The western Finnish dialects include the south-western dialects in Varsinais-Suomi and Satakunta, the Häme dialects in Häme, the southern Ostrobothnian dialect in Southern Ostrobothnia, the central and northern Ostrobothnian dialects in Central and Northern Ostrobothnia, and the Peräpohjola dialects in Lapland, Tornedalen and Finnmark. The eastern Finnish dialects include the Savo dialects in Savo, North Karelia, Central Finland, Kainuu, Järviseutu and Koillismaa, and the south-eastern dialects in South Karelia and, before the Second World War, on the Karelian Isthmus.

Learning Finnish is certainly a challenge, and it will take some time before you can answer "Puhutko suomea?" ("Do you speak Finnish?") with a yes. Not least because of its 15 cases, its agglutinative structure and the small overlap between its basic vocabulary and that of the Indo-European languages, it will take a lot of practice before you can speak this extraordinary language fluently.

Facts about the Finnish language:

• Spoken in: Finland, Sweden, Norway (Finnmark), Russia (Karelia), Estonia
• Official language in: Finland, Republic of Karelia, Nordic Council, European Union
• Recognised minority language in: Sweden, Finnmark (Norway), Karelia (Russia), Estonia
• Speakers: approx. 5 million
• Language codes: fi (ISO 639-1), fin (ISO 639-2), fin (ISO 639-3)
• Linguistic classification: Uralic - Finno-Ugric - Finno-Permic - Volga-Finnic - Finno-Samic - Baltic-Finnic - Finnish

Photo: Juhku - fotolia.com