Finnish language

Finnish language, also called Suomi, member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric languages. These languages form a subdivision of the Uralic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages). Finnish is spoken by about 5 million people in Finland. Additional speakers totaling close to 1 million live in neighboring areas of Sweden and Russia and also in the United States. There are several dialects. In Finnish the first syllable of a word is stressed. The language has 15 cases for nouns, personal pronouns, and adjectives. It lacks grammatical gender and the article. There is a negative conjugation for the verb. Like the other Uralic and Altaic languages, Finnish has vowel harmony and agglutination. Postpositions are employed instead of prepositions. Suffixation is used to form derived nouns and verbs. The Finnish vocabulary has been enriched by words borrowed from the Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic languages. A modified Roman alphabet is used for writing Finnish, which has been recorded since the 16th cent.

Bibliography

See F. Karlsson, Finnish Grammar (tr. 1983); E. Holman, ed., Finnish Verb Handbook (1984).

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Finnish language

Finno-Ugric language of Finland, spoken by some six million people worldwide, including perhaps 200,000 speakers in North America. Finnish was an unwritten language until the 16th century, when Mikael Agricola (1509–57) produced an alphabet book (1543) and a translation of the New Testament (1548); he is regarded as the founder of the Finnish literary language. Finnish was accorded official status in 1809, when Finland entered the Russian Empire after six centuries of Swedish domination. The publication in 1835 of the national folk epic, the Kalevala, created from folk songs collected by Elias Lönnrot, gave increased impetus to the movement to forge a common national language encompassing all dialect areas. Finnish shares with other Baltic Finnic languages a stock of ancient loanwords from Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and Sami.