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Finnish language

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Finnish is spoken by the majority in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. It is one of two official languages of Finland. Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is an agglutinative language which 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. This is mostly because there are few languages closely related to it, making the vocabulary unfamiliar. error: ISO 639 code is required (help)

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.

The first written form of Finnish language was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop in the 16th century. He based his writing system on Swedish (which was the official language of Finland at the time), 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 Mikael Agricola. In the 17th century books were written in Finland in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Estonian, Latvian, German, and Swedish. However, the most important books were still written in Latin. Finnish and Swedish (which in the late 17th century was decreed the sole language of government) were small languages of lesser importance.

Agricola's work

Agricola used dh or d to represent the voiced dental fricative (th in this) and tz or z to represent the unvoiced dental fricative (th in thanks). Later when these sounds disappeared or changed in the dialects, no one knew how to pronounce them so they adapted the pronunciation as in German (z = /ts/ and d = /d/), producing the soft D problem. Later the z became written 'ts'. (In the eastern part of Finland, dh became j,v, or disappeared; and it became r or l, or remained as dh for some time, while tz became ht or tt, in the Western parts.)

Agricola made up some words during translation of the New Testament. Some of these words are still in use ('armo' mercy, 'vanhurskas' righteous). One word which is still widely known, but not in use, is 'jalopeura' which means lion - the word 'leijona' is more common nowadays. 'Jalopeura' can be translated as 'noble deer'. Agricola used about 8500 words and 60% of them are still in use.

Ch, c or h was used for unvoiced velar fricative (ach-laut). Nowadays these sounds are allophones and thus represented only with h. Agricola used gh or g to represent the voiced velar fricative. Later this sound was lost and it wasn't written anymore.

Classification

Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. Finnish is an agglutinative language and a synthetic language which modifies both noun and verb forms depending on their role in the sentence.

Geographic distribution

Finnish is spoken by about 6 million people, mainly in Finland; there are small Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia and Estonia; in addition, a few hundred thousand emigrated Finns live in Sweden, and also in North America there remain communities of Finnish speaking emigrants, notably in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Official status

Finnish is an official language of Finland. 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. [1]

Western dialects

The South-West dialects (Lounaismurteet) are spoken in Finland Proper and Satakunta. The Tavastian dialects (Hämäläismurteet) are spoken in Tavastia. The Southern Ostrobothnian dialects (Eteläpohjalaiset murteet) are spoken in Southern Ostrobothnia. 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.

Some linguists also include Meänkieli, which is spoken in Swedish Westrobothnia, in the Far-Northern dialects.

A Finnish dialect called Ruijan murre is spoken in Finnmark, 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 around St. Petersburg in Russia and Ingria.

Formal and informal Finnish

Main article: Spoken Finnish

The Finnish linguistic situation is to some extent comparable to that of much of the Arabic speaking world, where Classical Arabic is used in official and religious speech and in the literature, whereas colloquial forms of Arabic are used in everyday conversation and in personal letters.

There are two main varieties of Finnish used throughout the country. One is the yleiskieli, or the general language, and the other puhekieli, or the speaking language. Yleiskieli is usually used in formal situations like church sermons, political speech and newscasts. Its written form, kirjakieli, is used nearly in all of the written texts, not always excluding even the dialogue of common people in popular prose. Kirjakieli means the book language. Puhekieli, 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 kirjakieli is quite rare in personal letters and in conversations in the Internet.

The puhekieli has mostly developed naturally from earlier forms of Finnish, and spread from main cultural and political centers. The kirjakieli, 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 puhekieli develops significantly faster, and the grammatical simplifications includes also the most common pronouns and suffixes, which sums up to frequent but modest differences.

Finnish children usually acquire the knowledge of kirjakieli when educated in school, but many children who read much learn it as their (written) "first language".

Examples

formal language — colloquial language
he menevät — ne menee (they go)
onko teillä — onks teil (do you have?)
emme sano — me ei sanota (we don't say)
(minun) kirjani — mun kirja (my book)
kuusikymmentäviisi — kuus(kyt)viis (sixty-five)
tulen — tuun (I'm coming)
väkeä — väkee (people)
punainen — punanen (red)

Sounds

Main article: Finnish phonetics

See also spoken Finnish

Grammar

Main article: Finnish grammar

Vocabulary

Since Finnish is agglutinative and inflected, it has a smaller core vocabulary than, for example, English, and uses derivative suffixes to a greater extent. As an example, take the word kirja (a book), from which one can form derivatives kirjain (a letter [of the alphabet]), kirje (a letter [a piece of correspondence]), kirjasto (a library), kirjailija (an author), kirjallisuus (literature), kirjoittaa (to write), kirjoittaja (someone who writes), kirjallinen (something in written form), kirjata (to write down, register, record), kirjasin (a font), and others.

Here are some of the more common such suffixes. Which of each pair used depends on the word being suffixed using the rules of vowel harmony.

  • -ja/jä : someone who does something (eg. lukea = to read -> lukija = reader)
  • -lainen/läinen : inhabitant of (either noun or adjective) Englanti = England -> englantilainen = English person or thing; Helsinki -> helsinkiläinen = person from Helsinki
  • -sto/stö : forms a noun indicating a collection (kirja = a book -> kirjasto = a library; laiva = a ship -> laivasto = navy, fleet)
  • -in : a tool or instrument (kirjata = to book, to file -> kirjain = a letter (of the alphabet); vatkata = to whisk -> vatkain = a whisk, mixer)
  • -uri/yri : someone or something that does something (kaivaa = to dig -> kaivuri = a machine that digs; laiva = a ship -> laivuri = shipper, shipmaster)
  • -os/ös : forming nouns describing the result of some action (tulla = to come -> tulos = result, outcome; tehdä to do -> teos = a piece of work)
  • -ton/tön : describing lack of something (onni = happiness -> onneton = unhappy; koti = home -> koditon = homeless)
  • -llinen : having (the quality of) something (lapsi = a child -> lapsellinen = childish; kauppa = a shop, commerce -> kaupallinen = commercial)
  • -kas/käs : another suffix similar to the above one (itse = self -> itsekäs = selfish; neuvo = advice -> neuvokas = resourceful)
  • -va/vä : doing or having something (taitaa = to be able (old-fashioned), might (modern modal auxiliary) -> taitava = skillful; johtaa = to lead -> johtava = leading)
  • -la/lä : a place related to the main word (kana = a hen -> kanala = a henhouse; pappi = a priest -> pappila = a parsonage)
  • Plenty more to add ...

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!

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" (cf. Gothic eiþai) - 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 'emälaiva' = 'mothership' and 'emävale' = 'huge lie' ('a mother of 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 due to present-day Finland being part of the kingdom of Sweden from the 12th century A.D. until ceded to Russia in 1809. It is still today the case that about 6% of Finnish nationals have Swedish mother tongue. The Swedish speaking part of Finnish is known as 'suomenruotsalaiset' (Finland-Swedes). 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

For example, Raamattu (The 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 Orthdox 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 date.

Neologisms

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

puhelin = "telephone" (literally: "thing 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.

Orthographic features

The Finnish orthography is built upon the phonetic principle: with just a few subtle exceptions, each phoneme (distinct sound) of the language is represented by exactly one grapheme (independent letter), and each grapheme represents exactly one phoneme. This makes the language easy for its speakers to spell, and facilitates learning to read and write.

Some orthographical notes:

  • Old texts and personal names use "W" for "V" - both correspond to the same phoneme, a V less acute (thus closer to W) than in English.
  • Long vowels and consonants are represented by double occurrences of the relevant graphemes. This causes no confusion, and permits these sounds to be written without having to nearly double the size of the alphabet to accommodate separate graphemes for long sounds.
  • The N in "NK" is a velar nasal, like in English. As an exception to the phonetic principle, there is no G in "NG", which is a long velar nasal as in English "singalong". "N", you will notice, does not sound like "N" when followed by either "K" or "G" in English!
  • "H" occurring before a consonant sounds slightly harder than when occurring before a vowel.

The characters "Ä" and "Ö", although drawn as an "A" or "O" with two dots above, nevertheless are considered to be independent graphemes, even though "Ä" and "Ö" represent sounds similar to the corresponding sounds in German. An appropriate parallel from the English alphabet are the characters "C" and "G". They have a closer kinship than many other characters, but are indeed considered as graphemes in their own merits, since they distinguish meanings.

How the Finnish letters Ä and Ö differ from the Germanic (German, Swedish, English) letters with diacritics:

  • In German, the umlauted vowels are alphabetized together with their mother-characters, which is convenient as they often correlate with distinctions of tense, mood, or plurality such as Rad—Räder for "wheel"—"wheels". No such grammatical correlations occur in Finnish, e.g. päätös and paatos are different words. In collation, the letters Ä and Ö are placed at the end (see top of article for alphabetical order).
  • In German, umlauts are replaceable; "Ä" may be written as "AE" and "Ö" is replaceable by "OE". This is for instance used when the ¨ diacritic is not available, e.g. on a computer with a British or American keyboard. The German poet Goethe's name is written this way as a matter of historical loyalty, although it may be written as the equivalent 'Göthe'. This is not possible in Finnish. Replacing 'lähtö' with 'laehtoe' produces a word that is nonsense to a Finnish reader, and makes reading so hard that the reader usually stops after a few of those. Also AE and OE (and ÄE, ÄÖ, etc.) are vowel combinations of their own right; jae "division" is distinct from jää "ice".
  • The "Ä" occurs more frequently than its Germanic equivalent; for example it occurs five times in päivämäärä (calendar date).
  • The two dots on "Ä" and "Ö" are used in English and several other languages to mark dieresis; i.e. two consecutive vowels forming separate syllables (adjacent monophtongs), as in coördinate. This is again not the case in Finnish.

Thus it is a misnomer to call "Ä" and "Ö" umlauts when used in Finnish. However, no better name is known in English.

For technical reasons or convenience, the letter combinations "sh" and "zh" are often used in quickly or less carefully written texts instead of "š" and "ž". This is a deviation from the phonetic principle, and as such is liable to cause confusion. In practice however, these letters are used nowhere else than in transcriptions ( e.g. šakki, Tšekki, Saakašvili), so the damage is minimal. Finnish does not use the sounds "z", "š" or "ž", but for the sake of exactitude, they can be included in spelling. (The recommendation cites the Russian play Hovanshtshina as an example.) Many speakers pronounce all of them "s", or distinguish only between "s" and "š", because Finnish has no voiced sibilants (z, ž).

See also

Bibliography

English books

  • Finnish for Foreigners 1 (Maija-Hellikki Aaltio: ISBN 951-1-08145-4)
This is the first of 2 volumes, each of which has an associated exercises book. There is also a reader.
Volume 1 is grammar based, but takes things in nice small steps, so it isn't intimidating. It generally teaches the written language, but does point out the main differences in the spoken language. By the end of volume 1 you would have quite a good grasp of the language for everyday purposes.
  • Teach Yourself Finnish (Terttu Leney: ISBN 0-340-56174-2)
Quite good: the pace is quite fast as it covers all of FFF1 and some of FFF2, and includes exercises.
There are a couple of irritations: the chapters are long and rambling without any clear focus, and the vocabularies don't always contain all the words used in the dialogs.
  • Colloquial Finnish (Daniel Abondolo: ISBN 0-415-11389-X)
This book tries to cover most of what you need to know in 300 pages: from complete beginner to familiarity with both the written and spoken languages. It uses an original approach to the grammar which is challenging, but well worth tackling.
The book is intended for beginners willing to invest some time and energy into learning Finnish, as well as for those who have a fair grasp of the language already, but would like to improve their understanding of more colloquial aspects of Finnish — aspects largely neglected in other grammars. The spoken language dialogues are especially useful, as they let you know what you can expect to hear, rather than what you will read in the newspaper. The grammatical explanations are built around the dialogues, not cloned from previous grammars.
  • Finnish: An Essential Grammar (Fred Karlsson: ISBN 0-415-20705-3)
This book is much like Colloquial Finnish but deals mainly with the written form of the language (although pronunciation is dealt with). It is not laid out in a lesson-based format, so is suitable for those who are familiar with the language but need to consolidate their grammar, although 'no prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader'. If you are a beginner, use this as a reference to back up your course book.

Finnish books

  • Aletaan (Eila Hämäläinen & Salli-Marja Bessonoff: ISBN 951-45-4895-7) [tr. Let's begin]
  • Jatketaan (Eila Hämäläinen & Salli-Marja Bessonoff: ISBN 951-45-4872-8) [tr. Let's continue]
Together, these books and their associated exercise books form a fairly complete course in Finnish, roughly equivalent to the Finnish for Foreigners books. However, the production quality is rather spare: typewriter font throughout and poor layout. This book is not of so much use without a teacher.
  • Kato hei! (Maarit Berg & Leena Silfverberg: ISBN 951-792-028-8)
It is an attempt to cover how Finnish is actually spoken. However, it is not designed to teach Finnish, and pulls no punches about the language, so the reader needs a good grasp to make use of it. There are no exercises. This is one of the several stools between which Colloquial Finnish fell!
  • Tarkista tästä! (Hannele Jönsson-Korhola & Leila White: ISBN 951-792-007-5) [tr. Look for it here!]
Finnish relies heavily on changing the endings of words to indicate their role in a sentence. For example, there is one verb which means both "lend" or "borrow", but the direction is indicated by the ending of the person you are lending to or borrowing from. This book contains the rules for this and hundreds of similar situations.
  • Suomen kielioppia ulkomaalaisille (Leila White: ISBN 951-8905-65-7) [tr. Finnish Grammar for Foreigners]
A comprehensive treatment of Finnish grammar, concentrating on the written language. Useful for reference only.
  • Stadin snadi slangi (sanakirja) (Juhani Mäkelä: ISBN 951-0-22477-4) [tr. A little dictionary of city slang]
A Finnish-Helsinki-Finnish dictionary. Useful to residents.
  • Suomea ennen ja nyt (Laila Lehikoinen: ISBN 951-8905-80-0) [tr. Finnish then and now]
A comprehensive coverage of the history of both written and spoken Finnish, including a detailed discussion of the regional variations found in the spoken language.
Finnish edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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