Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of the Uralian group of languages.
“Suomi”, as the natives call it, has shared with Swedish its status as the official language of Finland since the year 1892. It is spoken by approximately six million people residing mostly in this country, as well as in Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Russia and Canada.
Due to the fact that Finland was under Swedish rule starting with the Middle Ages, it was only in the 16th century that Finnish appeared in writing. The first document written in Finnish was a translation of the New Testament.
Finland managed to break free from Sweden at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until then, Swedish had been the official language of the Suomi population, a fact that hindered the development of their native language. However, Finnish managed to survive and, under the guidance of several cultural personalities, it underwent a process of modernization. The personality who contributed the most to the formation of the new, standardized Finnish was the philologist Elias Lönnrot, the composer of the Finnish national epic Kalevala.
Finnish is considered by many a difficult language to learn. One thing is certain - difficult or not, Finnish is different from all the other European languages (including its “sisters” Hungarian and Estonian).
Finnish is a synthetic language. Its verbs and nouns have many inflections (Finnish nouns fall in fifteen cases!) that have to be learned by heart. However, it has the advantage of being a phonetic language which results in a mostly regular pronunciation pattern.
The alphabet used by the Finns is the Swedish variant of the Latin alphabet. Consequently, its characteristic is the use of letters ö and ä.
A particularity of Finnish language is the vowel harmony. There are three types of vowels in Finnish - back vowels, front vowels and neutral vowels. The rule goes that all the vowels in a word have to belong to the same category.
Finnish vowels and consonants can be long or short and the difference of length between them is able to change the meaning of a word completely.
Other characteristics of Finnish are the assimilation of consonants at word boundaries and the fact that the main stress in a word always falls on the first syllable.
There are two varieties of language used in Finland: standard Finnish (yleiskieli) and spoken Finnish (puhekieli). The written form of standard Finnish is called “book
Linguists have separated Finnish dialects into two groups: Eastern and Western. They are mutually intelligible and differ mostly by pronunciation.
The Finnish vocabulary is not very varied. The main procedure of forming new words is derivation, Finnish being famous for its extensive use of suffixes.
In spite of being acknowledged as one of the most difficult languages to learn, at present Finnish is taught at over a hundred universities all over the world.
Ioana Mihailas is a linguist for Lingo24 technical translation agencies in UK, a provider of high quality translations from and into Finnish.
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