Finnish

Finnish (native name suomi) is one of a group of closely related and to some extent mutually intelligible languages, known collectively as Baltic-Finnic. They are spoken mainly in the Republic of Finland, Republic of Karelia (Russian Federation), Estonia, and adjacent areas of Russia and Latvia. According to the 1979 Soviet census figures the number of speakers of Karelian was 138,400; Vepsian, 8,100; Ingrian, 700. In 2005 about two-thirds of the population of Estonia (1,345,000) spoke Estonian as their first language. Of historical interest, but almost extinct, are Votic and Livonian. Of the presentday population of Finland (5,274,820), the majority speak Finnish as their first language. An estimated 263,700 Finnish citizens speak Finland-Swedish as their first language, and in 2005 approximately 8,000 spoke Saami (formerly Lapp). Most speakers of FinlandSwedish and the Saami dialects of Finland are competent in Finnish. Finnish and Estonian are also spoken by migrants and their descendants in Sweden, Norway, northwest Russia and North America. The relationship of Finnish to the other major Finno-Ugric language, Hungarian, is

described elsewhere in this book (see pages 477-480). Attempts to reconstruct anything more than a relative chronology of the two languages’ separate development from ancient Finno-Ugric origins are inevitably speculative, and indeed there remain many uncertainties even about the historical development of the Baltic-Finnic languages. Until recently, scholars had assumed that speakers of a language of Finno-Ugric origin, ‘Pre-Finnic’, had migrated from regions to the east and southeast, reaching the area of present-day Estonia about 500 BC. There they were thought to have lived for several centuries in close contact first with Ancient Balts and then with groups of East Germanic peoples. According to this theory, about two thousand years ago a group of people speaking ‘Proto-Finnic’ – a development of ‘Pre-Finnic’ – was thought to have divided into smaller units which slowly migrated in various directions: south and southeast, north across the Gulf of Finland into Finland proper, and northeast

further and northeast into Olonets and Archangel Karelia. It was further thought that the northern lands into which these groups had migrated were largely empty of population apart from groups of Saami, who had moved north ahead of the Baltic-Finnic newcomers and who spoke a language that derived, probably through borrowing, from ‘Pre-Finnic’. In recent years, comparative multidisciplinary research has led to substantial revision

of this theory. Archaeologists have shown that Finland has been continuously inhabited for at least 8,000 years; comparative linguists and ethnographers now believe that speakers of Germanic and Baltic languages have inhabited various parts of the lands now occupied by speakers of the Baltic-Finnic languages for at least the last 3,500 years. Thus the early theory of a clearly stratified hierarchy of language contact and development has given way to one of a mosaic of sporadic contacts over a far longer time and probably of greater influence in shaping the grammar, syntax and lexicon of the Baltic-Finnic languages than had earlier been thought possible. A number of dialects, from which present-day Finnish took shape, were probably

being spoken in southern and western Finland in the early centuries AD. The available evidence indicates an area of small, isolated settlements, inhabited by hunters and fishermen; wandering northwards they began to combine pastoralism with food gathering and then slowly adapted to a primitive agricultural way of life, largely dependent on burn-beat cultivation. In the southern coastal regions contacts were formed with traders coming from the east and Vikings from the west. Although fragments of Christianity began to penetrate from the east during the late dark ages, the inhabitants’ religious world-view appears to have been animist, and it was not until the twelfth century, with the Swedish Crusades, that efforts were made to replace this ancient world-view with that of Roman Catholic Christianity. At the same time a centrally based system of government was instituted which demanded faith in the Christian deity, loyalty to a ruler, service to those in authority and the payment of taxes. The confluence in Finland of influences from various directions and their impact on Arctic and sub-Arctic cultures accounts for the present-day east-west distribution of linguistic, anthropological and ethnographical distinctive features along an axis running northwest from the region of Viipuri in the south to Oulu in the north; historically and politically this division was fixed by the Treaty of Schlüsselburg signed between Sweden and Novgorod in 1323. Although there have been various changes in the frontier since then (notably in 1595, 1617, 1721, 1743, 1809 and 1944), none of these has altered in any significant way the east-west linguistic, anthropological and ethnographical division. Since the late middle ages the dominant political and cultural influences that have

shaped – and preserved – Finnish were religion and nationalism. The earliest written record known to survive in a Baltic-Finnic language is a spell written in a Karelian dialect, and dated to the thirteenth century. Although there is sufficient evidence from secular and non-secular sources to show that Finnish was in use as a written language during the late middle ages, when the Church of Rome was still dominant, the earliest surviving specimens of continuous passages in Finnish date from the 1540s with the publication in 1542 of Bishop Mikael Agricola’s Abckiria (‘ABC book’), the first known printed book to appear after the declaration of the Reformation in Finland in 1527. This was followed by various liturgical and biblical works written or translated in a literary language which was codified from dialects spoken in

the until early nineteenth century. The growth of a national consciousness that began at the end of the eighteenth cen-

tury awoke among a small but influential number of intellectuals a desire to cultivate a distinctive Finnish national identity rooted in the Finnish language. This ideal gained powerful momentum early in the nineteenth century when Finland became a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire, and the following generation of nationalists took as their aim the elevation of Finnish to equal standing with Swedish as a language of government, trade, commerce, education and culture. This aim was achieved in 1863 with the issue of the Language Edict. A literary language, codified in the course of the nineteenth century, retained much of the old canon, although its structure and lexicon were revised and standardised to take account of the dialects of Eastern Finland that had acquired prominence through the publication in 1835 and 1849 of Elias Lönnrot’s compilation of oral epic poems, Kalevala. Finnish shares with Hungarian a rich vocalism, but unlike Hungarian it has relatively

few consonant phonemes. It is an agglutinative language with a complex but consistent regularity in its morphophonology; inflectional suffixes, of which a large number have cognates in most other Finnic-Ugric languages, account for a wide range of grammatical functions, while a large stock of derivational suffixes provides a productive source of word creation. Of particular interest in the structure of Finnish is the case system and the variety of finite and non-finite verbal categories. (In the present description of the characteristic features of Finnish, the typographic conventions used in the chapter on Hungarian have been observed (i.e. suffixes are written to the right of a hyphen (-) if they are inflectional, or to the right of an equals sign (=) if they are derivational).) (See Table 29.1.)

The orthography of standard Finnish is for the most part phonetic. With three exceptions each letter represents a single phoneme; with two exceptions all sounds are marked orthographically. If a letter is written twice, it indicates that quantity is double the length of a single sound.