Finnish language

Finnish (suomi or suomen kieli) is a Finno-Ugric language and is spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric group of languages which is a member of the Uralic family of languages. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, which is closely related to Finnish, is an official minority language in Norway.

Finnish has an affiliation with the Uralic languages in several respects including shared morphology and basic vocabulary.
The most widely held view about the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga.

The Finns are more genetically similar to their Indo-European speaking neighbors than to the speakers of the geographically close Finno-Ugric language, Sami. It has been argued that a native Finnic-speaking population therefore absorbed northward migrating Indo-European speakers who adopted the Finnic language, giving rise to the modern Finns.

Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish) and an official minority language in Sweden. It is also an official language of the European Union and one of the working languages of the Nordic Council.

Proto-Uralic language is considered to have arrived in Finland around 1900 BCE, soon to be developed into Proto-Finnic. The Balto-Finnic languages evolved from the Proto-Finnic language after the Sámi was separated from it around 1500-1000 BCE. The Baltic Finnic languages separated around the 1st century, but continued to influence each other. Therefore, the Eastern Finnish dialects are genetically Eastern Proto-Finnic, with many Eastern features, and the Southwestern Finnish dialects have many genuine Estonian influences.

Before Finland was annexed to Catholic Sweden in the Middle Ages, Finnish was an oral language. The first comprehensive writing system for Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop, in the 16th century. He based his orthography on Swedish, German, and Latin. Written Finnish was used almost exclusively in religious contexts. In the 19th century Johan Vilhelm Snellman and others began to stress the need to improve the status of Finnish. Concerted efforts were made to improve the status of the language and to modernize it, and by the end of the century Finnish had become a language of administration, journalism, literature, and science in Finland, along with Swedish.

The dialects of Finnish are divided into two distinct groups, the Western dialects and the Eastern dialects. They sre mutually intelligible and distinguished from each other by only minor changes in vowels, diphthongs, and rhythm.

There are also two main varieties of Finnish used throughout the country. One is the "standard language" (yleiskieli), and the other is the "spoken language". The standard language is used in formal situations. Its written form, the "book language" (kirjakieli), is used in nearly all written texts. The spoken language is the main variety of Finnish used in popular TV and radio shows and at workplaces, and may be preferred to a dialect in personal communication.

Modern Finnish is regarded a subject-verb-object language. Verbs gain personal suffixes for each person; these suffixes are grammatically more important than pronouns, which are often not used in standard Finnish. There are four persons: first ("I, we"), second ("you (singular), you (plural)"), third ("s/he, they"), and indefinite (often called impersonal or "passive", similar to English "people say/do/…"). There are four tenses: present, past, perfect, and pluperfect. The future tense is not needed due to context and the telic contrast.

Nouns may be suffixed with the markers for the accusative case and partitive case, the genitive case, eight different locatives, and a few other cases. The case marker must be added not only to the main noun, but also to its modifiers. Possession is marked with a possessive suffix; separate possessive pronouns are unknown. Pronouns gain suffixes just as nouns do.

The Finnish language has borrowed a large number of words from several languages, most of them being Indo-European languages. In recent times, Finnish has borrowed a lot from Swedish. Especially words dealing with administrative or modern culture came to Finnish from Swedish.

Typical Russian loanwords are old or very old, thus hard to recognize as such, and concern everyday concepts. Most recently, and with increasing impact, English has been the source of new loanwords in Finnish.

Information: Wikipedia