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Finnish language

Finnish (suomi (help·info)) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92%) and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is also an official language in Finland and an official minority language in Sweden, in the form of standard Finnish as well as Meänkieli, and in Norway in the form of Kven.

Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is classified as an agglutinative language. It modifies the forms of both noun and adjective depending on their roles in the sentence. It has a reputation for being difficult to understand and learn.

There are few languages closely related to Finnish, thus making the vocabulary unfamiliar.

History

It is believed that the Baltic Finnic languages evolved from a proto-Finnic language, from which Sami was separated around 1500-1000 BC. It has been suggested that this proto-Finnic had three dialects: northern, southern and eastern. The Baltic Finnic languages separated around the 1st century, but kept on influencing each other. Therefore, the Eastern Finnish dialects are genetically Eastern proto-Finnic, with many Eastern features, and the Southwestern Finnish dialects have many genuine Estonian influences.

The first written form of Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop in the 16th century. He based his orthography on Swedish, German, and Latin. Later the written form was revised by many people.

The Reformation marked the real beginning of writing in Finnish. In the 16th century major literary achievements were composed in Finnish by people like Paavali Juusten, Erik Sorolainen, and Jaakko Finno, as well as Agricola himself. In the 17th century books were written in Finland in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Estonian, German, and Swedish. However, the most important books were still written in Latin. Finnish and Swedish were small languages of lesser importance.

Agricola's work

The basis for the numerous conventions in the Finnish standard language is found in Agricola's work, particularly with respect to spelling. Agricola's language was based on Western Finnish, thus that phonology found its way into the standard Finnish spelling.

Agricola used dh or d to represent the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (English th in this) and tz or z to represent the unvoiced dental fricative /θ/ (the th in thin). Later, when these sounds disappeared or changed in the different dialects, no one knew how to pronounce them. (Today, the [ð] sound is only in a few particular accents in Western Finland.) However, the spelling remained unchanged, so the standard language pronunciation of d and z was loaned from German (z = /ts/ and d = /d/), producing the "soft D" problem (see Finnish phonology). Later, z came to be written ts. In the standard language, /ð/ remained [d], e.g. sydän. In the eastern part of Finland, /ð/ became j, v, or disappeared. In the west, it became r, l or d. The sound /θ/ became ht or tt (e.g. meþþä → mehtä, mettä) in the east and some Western dialects, but became ts in the standard language and many Western dialects (meþþä → metsä).

Agricola made up some words during translation of the New Testament. Some of these words are still in use, e.g. armo "mercy", vanhurskas "righteous". Agricola used about 8500 words and 60% of them are still in use.

Either ch, c or h were used for the voiceless velar fricative (the ach-laut, /x/). In modern Finnish, the difference between /x/ and /h/ has been lost in phonemic terms; while velar friction might appear in 'h', spelling does not reflect it. For example, Agricola's spelling techtin becomes modern tehtiin. Agricola used gh or g to represent the voiced velar fricative. This sound was later lost and also suppressed in spelling, except if it appeared intervocalically, when it became 'v'.

Classification

Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family (which also includes Hungarian). Finnish is a synthetic language of the agglutinative type. Some fusion is found in spoken Finnish. It modifies noun and verb forms depending on their role in the sentence.

Among the grammatical features that demonstrate Finnish's affiliation with the Finno-Ugric Languages are:

Plural '-t', first person 'm', second person 't'
Grammatical cases are denoted with suffixes, which can be concatenated
Large number of case and derivational suffixes
The possessive suffix, possession denoted by a suffix on the possessee
Common vocabulary, mostly about neolithic culture, not found in other languages of the region

Features that demonstrate the unrelatedness of Finnish to Indo-European languages are:

absence of grammatical gender (also worth noting is that the same Finnish pronoun hän denotes both he and she),
absence of articles (a and the in English),
long words due to the structure of the language,
numerous grammatical cases,
prepositions and postpositions are uncommon and often inflected or derived words, e.g. taka- "posterior-" to takana "behind", literally "at posterior"
no equivalent of the verb to have, instead a locative construction is used.

There are various theories about the time and place where Finno-Ugric originated; according to the most recent theory Hungarian and Finnish are divided by 6000 years of separate development.

Speakers of a Finno-Ugrian language have been living in the region of current Finland since at least 3000 BC. The theory is that Proto-Finnish was divided into three dialects, southern, northern and eastern; standard Finnish represents the northern variety, Eastern Finnish stems from the eastern dialect. Finnish borrowed several words from other Finnic languages such as Estonian, Vepsian, Vote and Lude. Some grammatical features were also borrowed. More recently, Finnish has borrowed from Swedish and the other Germanic languages.

Geographic distribution

Finnish is spoken by about 6 million people, mainly in Finland. There are Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia and Estonia. A few hundred thousand recently emigrated Finns live in Sweden. Significant emigration took place in the 1970's, with Finland struggling under unemployment but Sweden providing jobs in e.g. the car industry. In the Americas, there are also immigrant communities. In North America, these are found in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and adjacent areas around Lake Superior. In South America small communities are found in Argentina and Brazil.

Official status

Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish, spoken by a 5% minority) and thus an official language of the European Union. It enjoys the status of an official minority language in Sweden.

Dialects

The Finnish dialects are divided into two distinct groups, the Western dialects and the Eastern dialects. The dialects are entirely mutually intelligible and characterized only by minor changes in vowels, diphthongs and rhythm, and as such, they are better classified as accents. For the most part, the dialects operate on the same phonology, grammar and vocabulary. There are only marginal examples of sounds or grammatical constructions isolated to some dialect, not found in standard Finnish. Two examples are the voiced dental fricative found in Rauma dialect and the Eastern excessive case.

The classification of closely related dialects spoken outside of Finland is a politically sensitive issue that has been more or less controversial since Finland's independence in 1917. The speakers of Karelian language in Russia and of Meänkieli in Sweden are typically considered oppressed minorities. Karelian is different enough from standard Finnish to have its own orthography. Meänkieli is a northern dialect, entirely intelligible and interchangeable with any other Finnish dialect that got the status as a minority language in Sweden for historical and political reasons.

Western dialects

The South-West dialects (lounaismurteet) are spoken in Finland Proper and Satakunta. Their typical feature is abbreviation of word-final vowels, and in many respects, they resemble Estonian. The Tavastian dialects (hämäläismurteet) are spoken in Tavastia. They are closest to the standard language, but feature some slight vowel changes, such as the opening of diphthong-final vowels (tie → tiä, miekka → miakka, kuolisi → kualis). The Southern Ostrobothnian dialects (eteläpohjalaiset murteet) are spoken in Southern Ostrobothnia. Their most notable feature is pronunciation of 'd' as a tapped or even fully trilled /r/. The Middle and North Ostrobothnia dialects (keski- ja pohjoispohjalaiset murteet) which are spoken in Central and Northern Ostrobothnia. The Far-Northern dialects (peräpohjalaiset murteet) are spoken in Lapland. These dialects spoken in the western parts of Lapland are recognizable by retention of extraneous 'h' sounds in positions where they are not found in other dialects.

One of the Far-Northern dialects, Meänkieli, which is spoken on the Swedish side of the border that was created in 1809, is taught in some Swedish schools as a distinct standardized language. The categorization of Meänkieli as a separate language is controversial among the Finns, who see no linguistic criteria, only political reasons, for treating Meänkieli differently than other dialects of Finnish.

The Ruija dialect (Ruijan murre) is spoken in Finnmark (Finnish Ruija), in Norway. It is remnant from Finnish emigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Eastern dialects

The Eastern dialects consist of the widespread Savonian dialects (savolaismurteet) spoken in Savo and near-by areas. The South-Eastern dialects (kaakkoismurteet) are spoken in South Karelia, on the Karelian Isthmus and in Ingria. They retain the phonetic palatalization found in all Uralic languages except Western Finnish. Per Finnish orthography, this is denoted with a 'j', e.g. vesj, cf. standard vesi.

Usually, a distinction is made between a more distantly related Karelian language that is spoken in those parts of Karelia that never have been ruled from the West. However, the terms Karelian and Karelian dialects are often used without distinctions, primarily denoting dialects spoken on the Karelian Isthmus and in Ingria, i.e. in the Saint Petersburg area, but in a way that diplomatically may leave open for interpretation the question of whether the speaker considers the Karelian language a dialect of Finnish or not. Hence, the many refugees from Finnish Karelia, that were evacuated during World War II and resettled all over Finland, speak Savonian dialects, although their dialects in everyday speech often are referred to as Karelian.

Formal and informal Finnish

There are two main varieties of Finnish used throughout the country. One is the "standard language" (yleiskieli), and the other is the "spoken language" puhekieli. The standard language is used in formal situations like church sermons, political speeches and newscasts. Its written form, the "book language" (kirjakieli), is used nearly in all of the written texts, not always excluding even the dialogue of common people in popular prose. The term "standard language" does not actually exactly coincide with the term yleiskieli, because the definition is that yleiskieli lacks the everyday colloquial register.

The spoken language, on the other hand, is the main variety of Finnish to be used in popular TV and radio shows, at workplaces and it is sometimes preferred to speaking a dialect in personal communication. Also, the standard language is quite rare in personal letters and in conversations on the Internet, where strict "correctness" is not in force. The differences between the two are comparable to differences between Standard English and some English ethnolect.

The spoken language has mostly developed naturally from earlier forms of Finnish, and spread from main cultural and political centers. The book language, however, has always been a consciously constructed medium for literature. It preserves grammatical patterns that have mostly vanished from the colloquial varieties and, as its main application is writing, it features complex syntactic patterns that are not easy to handle when used in speech. The spoken language develops significantly faster, and the grammatical and phonological simplifications includes also the most common pronouns and suffixes, which sums up to frequent but modest differences. Some sound changes have been left out from the formal language, such as the irregularization of some common verbs by assimilation, e.g. tule- → tuu-.

Finnish children usually acquire the knowledge of the standard language when educated in school, but many children who read much learn it as their written "first language". Written language certainly still exerts a considerable influence upon the spoken word, due to the fact that illiteracy is nonexistent and that many Finns are avid readers. In fact, it is still not entirely uncommon to meet people who "talk like a book" (puhuvat kirjakieltä), although this habit is perceived as typical of "old elementary school teachers" and somewhat pedantic. More common is the intrusion of typically book-like constructions into a basically colloquial discourse, as a kind of loan or quote from written or formal Finnish. It should also be noted that it is quite common to hear book-like and polished speech on radio or TV, and the constant exposure to such carefully prepared language tends to lead to the adoption of book-like constructions even in everyday language. However, a foreign learner of Finnish who aims to live and work in Finland should try to acquire a grasp of the most common colloquial reductions in speech, because anybody not conversant with the talk of the street would feel somewhat at a loss in a relaxed speech situation, even if he were entirely able to understand the formal language of the news media.

The orthography of the informal language follows that of the formal language. However, sometimes sandhi may be transcribed, especially the internal ones, e.g. menenpä → menempä. This never takes place in formal language; some people believe that the sandhi should not be even pronounced in formal language.

Borrowing

Over the course of many centuries, the Finnish language has borrowed a great many words from a wide variety of languages. Indeed, some estimates put the core Finno-Ugric vocabulary surviving in Finnish at only around 300 word roots. (However, due to neologisms, the plain figure is misleading.)

The first loan words into Finno-Ugric languages seem to come from very early Indo-European languages, and later mainly from Indo-Iranian, Turkic, Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic languages.

The usual example quoted is kuningas "king" from Germanic *kuningaz, but another example is äiti "mother", from Gothic eiþai, which is interesting because borrowing of close-kinship vocabulary is a rare phenomenon. The original Finnish word for mother is emo, which still exists, though its use is now confined to animal species, as is the variant emä. This latter is also used in compounds in a figurative sense, such as emäalus "mothership", emolevy "motherboard" and emävale "huge lie" ("a mother of all lies"). There are other close-kinship words that are loaned from Baltic and Germanic languages (morsian "bride", armas "dear").

More recently, Swedish has been a prolific source of borrowings. Present-day Finland belonged to the kingdom of Sweden from the 12th century and was ceded to Russia in 1809, becoming autonomous. The upper class held Swedish as their primary language even after this, because Russia did not have a written law nor legal bureaucracies and left the Swedish-originated system mostly intact. When Finnish was accepted as an official language, it gained only legal "equal status" with Swedish, which persists even today. It is still the case today that about 6% of Finnish nationals, the Finland-Swedes, have Swedish as their mother tongue. During the period of autonomy, Russian did not gain much ground as a language of the people or the government. Nevertheless, a range of words were subsequently acquired from Russian (especially in older Helsinki slang) but not to the same extent as with Swedish. In all these cases, borrowing has been partly a result of geographical proximity.

Typical Russian loanwords are old or very old, thus hard to recognize as such, and concern everyday concepts, e.g. papu "bean", sini "(n.) blue" and pappi "priest". For example, Raamattu ("Bible") is a loanword from Russian, also other religious words are loaned from Russian. This is mainly believed to be result of trade with Novogorod 9th century and so on and the Orthodox converting in 13th century.

Most recently, and with increasing impact, English has been the source of new loanwords in Finnish. Unlike previous "geographical" borrowing, the influence of English is largely "cultural" and reaches Finland by many routes including: international business; music; film (except for the very young, foreign films are shown subtitled); literature; and, of course, the Internet — this is now probably the most important source of all non-face-to-face exposure to English.

The importance of English as the language of global commerce has led many non-English companies, including Finland's Nokia, to adopt English as their official operating language. Recently, it has been observed that English borrowings are not only ousting existing Finnish words, but also previous borrowings, for example the switch from treffailla "to date" (from Swedish, träffa) to deittailla from English "to go for a date". Calques from English are also found, e.g kovalevy (hard disk). Grammatical calques are also found, for example, the replacement of the impersonal (passiivi) with the English-style "you-impersonal", e. g. sä et voi "you cannot", instead of ei voi.

However, this does not mean that Finnish is threatened by English. Borrowing is normal language evolution, and neologisms are coined actively not only by the government, but also by the media. Moreover, Finnish and English have a considerably different grammar, phonology and phonotactics, discouraging direct borrowing. English loan words in Finnish slang include pleikkari "PlayStation", hodari "hot dog", hedari "headache" (native word being päänsärky, and native slang words including jysäri). Often these loanwords have a humorous origin, and certainly have that effect when used, rarely used in a negative mood or in formal language.

Neologisms

Some modern terms have been synthesised rather than borrowed, for example:

puhelin "telephone" (literally: "speak" + instrument suffix "-in" to make "an instrument for speaking")

tietokone "computer" (literally: "knowledge machine")

levyke "diskette" (from levy "disc" + a diminutive -ke)

sähköposti "email" (literally: "electrical mail")

The generic term for a diskette is levyke, but colloquially diskettes are referred to as lerppu (the now obsolete 5¼-inch floppy, derived from the word floppy) and korppu (the 3½-inch floppy, Finnish word for "rusk" or "biscuit" that obviously fits the description of the more rigid diskette and nicely resembles lerppu). The colloquial word romppu for the CD-ROM was invented in a contest by the magazine Suomen Kuvalehti when CD-ROM drives were becoming common in PCs in the early 1990s. This word led quickly into another neologism, romputin (CD-ROM drive)

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