FINNISH LANGUAGE -

INTERESTING TO KNOW

The Finnish language is a member of the Finno-Ugric linguistic family that includes, in one branch, Finnish, Estonian and a number of other Finnic tongues, and in the other, Hungarian, by far the biggest language of the Ugric group. Finland is officially bilingual: Finnish is the first language of 92%, and Swedish of 5.5% of the population. In addition, about 1,700 people in Lapland speak Sami (Lapp) languages.

Swedish-speaking Finns, of which there are about 300,000, are concentrated mainly along the coastlines of the south and the south-west archipelago and along the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia to the west. The official status of Swedish has historical roots in the period when Finland was a part of the Swedish realm, a period that lasted from the early 13th century until 1809.

Since Finnish is the mother tongue of only about five million people in the world, the ability to speak foreign languages is essential for Finns. This is an advantage to foreign visitors, because many Finns speak English, German or some other European language. English is the most popular foreign language and it is widely spoken.

Finnish has a reputation as a difficult language. Its characteristic features include an absence of definite and indefinite articles and of the distinction between male and female pronouns (hän means both "he" and "she"). There are only a few prepositions, which is compensated for by numerous grammatical cases. For example: auto = “car”; autossa = “in a (the) car”; autoon = “into a (the) car”. Moreover, Finnish is characterized by long words due to the structure of the language. Some examples of long and complex words are linja-autoasema (“bus station”), juustovoileipä (“cheese sandwich”), satakielipariskunta (“nightingale couple”), and ryhmäperhepäivähoitotoimintakokeilu (“a pilot project of children's private day care”). Since Finnish uses endings to substitute English prepositions, very long words such as tyytymättömyydessänsäkään (“not even in his/her dissatisfaction”) are common.

Finnish is often described as 'a phonetic language' and largely this holds true. It means that every grapheme (independent letter in writing) corresponds to one phoneme; i.e. every letter is always pronounced in the same way - unlike in English.

Through its history Finnish has been a major importer of vocabulary from other languages. In some cases Finnish seems to have acted like a deep-freeze preserving old loans in the original form while the same words in the source languages underwent changes. An example of this is Finnish kuningas 'king'. It is an old loan that has survived in its original form in Finnish whereas modern English has a king, Swedish kung, and German König. Another example is Finnish kaunis, which has preserved in its old form, while Swedish it is skön and in German schön.

Finnish has regional dialects and different social variants (jargons, slangs). Colloquial Finnish often differs markedly from the standard language.

Survival Finnish - common phrases and useful vocabulary:
http://www.uta.fi/studies/survivalguide/finnish_culture/vocabulary.html

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