Finnish language

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Finnish

suomen kieli

Pronunciation IPA: [ˈsuo̯ mi] (About this soundlisten)

Native to Finland, Sweden, Norway (in small areas in Troms and Finnmark), Russia

Ethnicity Finns

Native speakers 5.8 million

Finland 5.4 million

Sweden 0.40 million (2020)[1]

Language family

Uralic

Finnic

Northern Finnic

Finnish

Writing system Latin (Finnish alphabet)

Finnish Braille

Signed forms Signed Finnish

Official status
Official language in Finland

Sweden (official minority language)

European Union

Nordic Council

Recognised minority

language in

Russia

Karelia[2]

Norway (Kven language) (Finnmark)

Regulated by Language Planning Department of the Institute for the Languages of Finland

Language codes

ISO 639-1 fi

ISO 639-2 fin

ISO 639-3 fin

Glottolog finn1318

Linguasphere 41-AAA-a

Finnish language updated2.png

Official language.

Spoken by a minority.

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question
marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols,
see Help:IPA.

Finnish (endonym: suomi [ˈsuo̯ mi] (About this soundlisten) or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li]) is a Uralic
language of the Finnic branch spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns
outside Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish). In
Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish[3]) are
official minority languages. The Kven language, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish,
is spoken in the Norwegian county Troms og Finnmark by a minority group of Finnish descent.

Finnish is typologically agglutinative[4] and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation. Nouns, adjectives,
pronouns, numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in the sentence. Sentences are
normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows
them to be ordered otherwise. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information
structure.[5] The orthography is a Latin-script alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, and for the
most part each grapheme corresponds to a single phoneme and vice versa. Vowel length and consonant
length are distinguished, and there are a range of diphthongs, although vowel harmony limits which
diphthongs are possible.

Contents

1 Classification

2 Geographic distribution

3 Official status

4 History

4.1 Prehistory

4.2 Medieval period

4.3 Writing system

4.4 Modernization

4.5 Future

5 Dialects

5.1 Western dialects

5.2 Eastern dialects

5.3 Example Helsinki slang (Stadin slangi)

5.4 Dialect chart of Finnish

6 Linguistic registers

6.1 Standardization

6.2 Colloquial Finnish

6.3 Examples

7 Phonology

7.1 Segmental phonology

7.1.1 Vocalic segments

7.1.2 Consonants
7.2 Prosody

8 Morphophonology

9 Grammar

10 Lexicon

10.1 Borrowing

10.2 Neologisms

10.3 Loans to other languages

11 Orthography

12 Language examples

13 Basic greetings and phrases

14 Phonaesthetics and influences

15 See also

16 References

17 Further reading

18 External links

Classification

Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages. The Finnic group also includes
Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in Russia's Republic of Karelia.

Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with other Uralic languages (such as Hungarian) in several respects
including:

Shared morphology:

case suffixes such as genitive -n, partitive -(t)a / -(t)ä ( < Proto-Uralic *-ta, originally ablative), essive -na /
-nä ( < *-na, originally locative)

plural markers -t and -i- ( < Proto-Uralic *-t and *-j, respectively)

possessive suffixes such as 1st person singular -ni ( < Proto-Uralic *-n-mi), 2nd person singular -si ( <
Proto-Uralic *-ti).

various derivational suffixes (e.g. causative -tta/-ttä < Proto-Uralic *-k-ta)

Several theories exist as to the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages. The most
widely held view is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt
around the Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga. The strong case for Proto-Uralic
is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact
that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar.[6]

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, United States classifies Finnish as a level III
language (of 4 levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers.[7]

Geographic distribution

Areas in Southern Sweden with a Finnish-speaking population (2005)

Finnish is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland. There are also notable
Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States.
The majority of the population of Finland (90.37% as of 2010[8]) speak Finnish as their first language.
The remainder speak Swedish (5.42%),[8] one of the Sámi languages (for example Northern, Inari, or
Skolt), or another language as their first language. Finnish is spoken as a second language in Estonia by
about 167,000 people.[9] The varieties of Finnish found in Norway's Finnmark (namely Kven) and in
northern Sweden (namely Meänkieli) have the status of official minority languages, and thus can be
considered distinct languages from Finnish. However, since all three are mutually intelligible, one may
alternatively view them as dialects of the same language.

There are also Finnish forms of Finnish spoken by diasporas in Siberia, by the Siberian Finns[10] and in
America, where American Finnish is spoken by the Finnish Americans.[11]

Official status

Today, Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish), and has been an
official language of the European Union since 1995. However, the Finnish language did not have an
official status in the country during the period of Swedish rule, which ended in 1809. After the
establishment of Grand Duchy of Finland, and against the backdrop of the Fennoman movement, the
language obtained its official status in the Finnish Diet of 1863.[12]
Finnish also enjoys the status of an official minority language in Sweden. Under the Nordic Language
Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Finnish have the opportunity to use their native
language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any
interpretation or translation costs.[13][14] However, concerns have been expressed about the future
status of Finnish in Sweden, for example, where reports produced for the Swedish government during
2017 show that minority language policies are not being respected, particularly for the 7% of Finns
settled in the country.[15]

History

Prehistory

The Uralic family of languages, of which Finnish is a member, are hypothesized to derive from a single
ancestor language termed Proto-Uralic, spoken sometime between 8,000 and 2,000 BCE (estimates
vary) in the vicinity of the Ural mountains.[16] Over time, Proto-Uralic split into various daughter
languages, which themselves continued to change and diverge, yielding yet more descendants. One of
these descendants is the reconstructed Proto-Finnic, from which the Finnic languages developed,[17]
and which diverged from Proto-Samic (a reconstructed ancestor of the Sámi languages) around 1500–
1000 BCE.[18]

Current models assume that three or more Proto-Finnic dialects evolved during the first millennium BCE.
[19][17] These dialects were defined geographically, and were distinguished from one another along a
north-south split as well as an east-west split. The northern dialects of Proto-Finnic, from which Finnish
developed, lacked the mid vowel [ɤ]. This vowel was found only in the southern dialects, which
developed into Estonian, Livonian, and Votian. The northern variants used third person singular pronoun
hän instead of southern tämä (Est. tema). While the eastern dialects of Proto-Finnic (which developed in
the modern-day eastern Finnish dialects, Veps, Karelian, and Ingrian) formed genitive plural nouns via
plural stems (e.g., eastern Finnish kalojen < *kaloi-ten), the western dialects of Proto-Finnic (today's
Estonian, Livonian and western Finnish varieties) used the non-plural stems (e.g., Est. kalade < *kala-
ten). Another defining characteristic of the east-west split was the use of the reflexive suffix -(t)te, used
only in the eastern dialects.[17]

Medieval period

Birch bark letter no. 292 is oldest known document in any Finnic language

The birch bark letter 292 from the early 13th century is the first known document in any Finnic language.
The first known written example of Finnish itself is found in a German travel journal dating back to
c.1450: Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho sommen gelen Emÿna daÿda (Modern Finnish: "Minä tahdon
kernaasti puhua suomen kielen, [mutta] en minä taida;" English: "I want to speak Finnish, [but] I am not
able to").[20] According to the travel journal, the words are those of a Finnish bishop whose name is
unknown. The erroneous use of gelen (Modern Finnish kielen) in the accusative case, rather than kieltä
in the partitive, and the lack of the conjunction mutta are typical of foreign speakers of Finnish even
today.[21] At the time, most priests in Finland were Swedish speaking.[22]

During the Middle Ages, when Finland was under Swedish rule, Finnish was only spoken. At the time, the
language of international commerce was Middle Low German, the language of administration Swedish,
and religious ceremonies were held in Latin. This meant that Finnish speakers could use their mother
tongue only in everyday life. Finnish was considered inferior to Swedish, and Finnish speakers were
second-class members of society because they could not use their language in any official situations.
There were even efforts to reduce the use of Finnish through parish clerk schools, the use of Swedish in
church, and by having Swedish-speaking servants and maids move to Finnish-speaking areas.[23]