Finnish language

• 1. Introduction

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  Finnish, known to its speakers as suomi, belongs to a family of languages that has no connection to the great Indo-European tree that gave rise to English, French, German, Spanish, and most of the other tongues of Europe. That alone makes it unusual. But Finnish is unusual in other ways too. Its grammar works through a system of suffixes so productive that a single verb root can grow into more than a dozen distinct words, each carrying a shade of meaning that other languages need an entire phrase to convey. The word istahtaisinkohankaan, for example, means roughly "I wonder if I should sit down for a while after all." It is one word. What kind of language does this? Where did it come from? And how did it survive centuries of being considered inferior, spoken but never written, before becoming a full literary and official language? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Family Apart

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  Proto-Uralic, the ancestor language from which Finnish ultimately descends, is estimated to have been spoken somewhere between 8,000 and 2,000 BCE, in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains. That is a wide range of estimates, and scholars note that the most widely held view places its homeland in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region and the bend of the middle Volga. Over thousands of years, Proto-Uralic split into daughter languages, which themselves diverged further, eventually producing Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and the Sami languages, among others.

  The kinship among these languages shows up in shared vocabulary with regular sound correspondences. The Finnish word kala, meaning fish, corresponds to North Saami guolli and Hungarian hal. The verb kadota, to disappear, matches North Saami guođđit and Hungarian hagy, meaning to leave behind. These parallels are not coincidences; they trace back to a common ancestor.

  The Finnic branch within this family also includes Estonian and several minority languages around the Baltic Sea and in Russia's Republic of Karelia. The closest relative of Finnish is either Ingrian or, depending on how the boundaries are drawn, Karelian. Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible in their standard forms, yet there is no single clean dividing line between them; the Finnic languages form a dialect continuum where the boundary between what counts as Finnish and what counts as Estonian is blurry at the regional level. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, classifies Finnish as a level III language for native English speakers, placing it among the more challenging languages to acquire.

• 3. The Writing System's Origins

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  Birch bark letter number 292, dating to the early 13th century, holds the distinction of being the first known document in any Finnic language. It is written in a variety closest to modern Karelian or Veps, not yet Finnish proper. The first known written example of Finnish itself appears in a German travel journal dating to around 1450. The journal records a sentence a Finnish bishop reportedly spoke: "Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho sommen gelen Emÿna daÿda," which translates roughly as "I want to speak Finnish, but I am not able to." The bishop's name is unknown. The source notes that the erroneous use of the accusative case where the partitive would be expected is typical of foreign speakers of Finnish even today.

  During the Middle Ages, when Finland was under Swedish rule, Finnish existed only as a spoken language. Swedish handled administration, Middle Low German served international commerce, and Latin was the language of the church. Finnish speakers could use their mother tongue only in everyday life, and there were active efforts to reduce even that use, through parish clerk schools, the promotion of Swedish in church, and by placing Swedish-speaking servants and maids in Finnish-speaking areas.

  The person who changed this was Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop who created the first comprehensive writing system for Finnish in the 16th century. His model was the western dialects, and he drew on Swedish, German, and Latin to build the orthography. His ultimate goal was a translation of the Bible, but to get there he first had to invent a way of writing the language. The Finnish standard language still relies on his innovations for spelling, though later scholars worked to systematize what he had left inconsistent. Agricola used k, c, and q interchangeably for the same phoneme, for instance, a problem his successors spent generations correcting.

• 4. The Modernization Campaign

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  Johan Vilhelm Snellman, in the 19th century, became one of the central voices arguing that Finnish deserved to be a fully-fledged national language. His argument drew on Hegelian ideas of nationalism, and it gained considerable support. Written Finnish had been used almost exclusively in religious contexts ever since Agricola's era; by the end of the 19th century, through deliberate effort, it had become a language of administration, journalism, literature, and science alongside Swedish.

  In 1853, Daniel Europaeus published the first Swedish-Finnish dictionary. Between 1866 and 1880, Elias Lönnrot compiled the first Finnish-Swedish dictionary. Lönnrot is perhaps better known as the compiler of the Kalevala, but his influence on the development of modern Finnish vocabulary was equally significant. He also served as an arbiter in disputes between advocates of the western and eastern dialects, ensuring that the western dialects Agricola had favored retained their central role while many words from the eastern dialects were incorporated into the standard language, broadening it considerably.

  The first novel written in Finnish by a Finnish speaker was Aleksis Kivi's Seven Brothers, published in 1870 under the Finnish title Seitsemän veljestä. Before that, Finnish had gained its first formal official recognition in the Finnish Diet of 1863, which established legal equal status with Swedish, following the end of Swedish rule in 1809 and the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Finland. Finnish has been one of two official languages of the European Union since 1995.

• 5. The Grammar's Inner Logic

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  Finnish is typologically agglutinative, which means it builds meaning by attaching suffixes to roots rather than relying on separate words or changes to the root itself. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, and verbs are all inflected according to their role in a sentence. This creates enormous expressive range from a relatively small core vocabulary.

  One of the most distinctive features is vowel harmony. Finnish vowels are divided into front and back categories, and within any given word, all vowels must belong to the same group. So the suffix for a word containing back vowels becomes -a, while the same suffix applied to a word with front vowels becomes -ä. This is not allophony, meaning the two are not interchangeable pronunciations of the same sound; they are separate phonemes that carry meaning. The word tuote, meaning product, produces tuotteeseensa, meaning into his product, where the back vowel appears in the suffix because the root contains the back vowels uo.

  Consonant gradation is another morphophonological process that affects the inherited vocabulary. The alternation between a stronger and a weaker consonant depends on whether the syllable is open or closed. The word tarkka, meaning precise, takes the oblique stem tarka-, as in tarkan, meaning of the precise.

  The contrast between the accusative and partitive cases encodes a concept called telicity. The accusative marks an action completed as intended: ammuin hirven means I shot the elk dead. The partitive marks an incomplete action: ammuin hirveä means I shot at the elk. Finnish has no morphological future tense; instead, the telicity of the object case, along with context, distinguishes present from future. The sentence syön kalan, I eat a fish completely, must refer to a future event, since it is physically impossible to completely eat a fish at the very moment of speaking.

• 6. Dialects and Registers

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  Finnish dialects divide into two main groups, Western and Eastern. The Southwest Finnish dialects, spoken in Southwest Finland and Satakunta, abbreviate word-final vowels and in some respects resemble Estonian. The Tavastian dialects, spoken in Tavastia, are closest to the standard language. The South Ostrobothnian dialects are recognizable by the pronunciation of d as a tapped or fully trilled r. In Lapland, the western dialects retain old h sounds in positions where other dialects have lost them.

  The border drawn between Sweden and Finland in 1809, when the Russian Empire annexed Finland, created a linguistic separation that eventually produced Meänkieli, a form of speech that developed on the Swedish side of the border, isolated from the evolution of standard Finnish and increasingly influenced by Swedish. It is still mutually intelligible with Finnish. Kven, spoken in Finnmark and Troms in Norway, is spoken by descendants of Finnish emigrants who arrived in the 18th and 19th centuries. Both Meänkieli and Kven are recognized as official minority languages in their respective countries.

  The Karelian Isthmus dialects were disrupted during World War II, when the isthmus was evacuated and refugees were resettled across Finland. Most Ingrian Finns were deported to various interior areas of the Soviet Union.

  In terms of linguistic registers, Finnish operates through two main varieties: the standard language, used in political speeches and newscasts, and the spoken colloquial variety, used in popular media, workplaces, and personal communication. The colloquial form omits possessive clitics on nouns, shortens certain verb forms by eliding sonorants, and replaces the impersonal voice with a generic second-person construction borrowed from English patterns. Helsinki slang, known as Stadin slangi, has its own history; the first written account of it appears in an 1890 short story called Hellaassa by Santeri Ivalo.

• 7. Borrowing and Coinage

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  Finnish has absorbed words from many neighboring languages over its long history. Some of the oldest borrowings arrive from Baltic and Germanic sources: kuningas, meaning king, comes from the Germanic kuningaz, and äiti, meaning mother, derives from the Germanic aiþį̄. The borrowing of close-kinship vocabulary is rare across languages, which makes äiti notable. Ancient Iranian loans include vasara, meaning hammer, traced to the Avestan vadžra or vajra, and orja, meaning slave, from arya or airya, meaning man, arriving through a process similar to how slave entered European languages from Slav.

  A set of basic Finnish words, including jänis for hare, musta for black, saari for island, suo for swamp, and niemi for cape, have no traceable etymology in any known language. These are generally regarded as remnants of a Paleo-European language spoken in Fennoscandia before the arrival of proto-Finnic speakers.

  Swedish has been the most prolific borrowing source in recent centuries, partly through geographical proximity and partly because Finland was part of Sweden from the 12th century until 1809. Swedish also acted as a conduit for European administrative vocabulary. More recently, English has become the dominant source of new loanwords, arriving through international business, music, film, television, literature, and the web. Nokia, headquartered in Finland, adopted English as its official operating language. English borrowings now sometimes displace earlier Swedish-derived words; treffailla, to date, borrowed from the Swedish träffa, is giving way to deittailla, borrowed directly from English.

  At the same time, Finnish actively synthesizes new vocabulary through its derivational suffix system rather than simply borrowing. Puhelin, meaning telephone, is built from the stem puhel- meaning talk plus the instrument suffix -in. Tietokone, meaning computer, combines the words for knowledge and machine. Sähköposti, meaning email, is literally electricity mail. Neologisms are coined by the Language Planning Office and by the media, and they are widely adopted; using kompuutteri instead of tietokone now carries an old-fashioned or rural impression. The single most widely exported Finnish word, borrowed into English and many other languages, is sauna.