The first written documents in Finnish were created by bishop Mikael Agricola who wrote an ABC book in 1542 and a catechism in 1544. Agricola's writing system was based on Swedish, then the official language of Finland, as well as on German, and Latin. The writing system he devised was revised over time. Finnish is spoken by about 5 million people in Finland, where it is the official languag. It is officially recognized in Sweden and Norway. It is also spoken in Canada, Estonia, Russia, and USA. The total Finnish-speaking population of all countries is estimated to be around 6 million people (Ethnologue). There are two main varieties of Finnish:
The differences between the two varieties are quite significant, as can be seen from these examples:
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Finnish has a relatively small inventory of sounds with 8 vowel and 13 consonant phonemes. All phonemes can be short or long, except for /v, d, j, h/, for example muta " mud", muuta "other", mutta "but". Finnish always places stress on the first syllable of a word. Click here to listen to the pronunciation of some common phrases in Finnish. |
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Click here for a detailed description of Finnish cases. Postpositions are more common in Finnish than prepositions, for example "after Christmas" in Finnish is joulun jälkeen (literally "Christmas after"). Verb phrase |
Over the course of many centuries, Finnish has borrowed a great number of words from a wide variety of languages, including Turkic, Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic languages. It is estimated that only around 300 Finnish roots are of Uralic origin, the rest are borrowed from other languages. . Click here for a more detailed description of Finnish vocabulary. Below are some common phrases in Finnish. Do you see any resemblance to their Indo-European equivalents?
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Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Finnish.
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Present day Finnish uses the Roman alphabet, with the addition of the letters ä, ö and y. The consonants b, c, z and x are only used in loan words. |
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Finnish words in English Did you know that the word sauna came from Finnish sauna literally "bath room"? |
How difficult is it to learn Finnish? Finnish is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. |