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Language Information

There are approximately 5 million speakers of Finnish. Besides being the national language of Finland, it is spoken by about 200,000 people in the northern Sweden, 70,000 people in the United States, 50,000 people in northwestern Russia.

Finnish is one of the few languages of Europe not of the Indo-European family. Like Estonian, spoken across the Gulf of Finland, it is one of the Finno-Ugric languages, which constitute the main branch of the Uralic family.

The Finnish alphabet contains only twenty-one letters. There are thirteen consonants (d, g, h, j, k, 1, rn, n, p, r, s, t, v) and eight vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y, ä, ö). There is only one sound for every letter, one letter for every sound, and the stress is always on the first syllable. The language makes no distinction as to gender, and has no articles, either definite or indefinite.

Despite these simplifying factors, Finnish is undoubtedly an exceedingly difficult language to learn. Aside from foreign borrowings (mostly from the Germanic languages), the long, often compound words hear no similarity whatever to their counterparts in the Indo-European languages. The Finnish word for "question," for example, is kysymys, while the word for "twenty" is kaksikymmentä. Even the Finnish names of different countries are often hard to recognize—e.g., Suomi (Finland), Ruotsi (Sweden), Tanska (Denmark), Saksa (Germany), Ranska (France), and Venäjä (Russia). The number of case forms for nouns is staggering—whereas German has four cases, Latin five, and Russian six, Finnish has no fewer than fifteen! In addition to the familiar nominative, genitive, partitive, and ablative, there are also the elative, allative, illative, essive, inessive, adessive, abessive, and several others.

Finland, Russia, Sweden, United States of America.

Family: Uralic
Subgroup: Finno-Ugric
Branch: Finnic

Writing Sample

Translation

For I, Sinuhe, am a human being. I have lived in everyone who existed before me and shall live in all who come after me. I shall live in human tears and laughter, in human sorrow and fear, in human goodness and wickedness, in justice and injustice, in weakness and strength. As a human being I shall live eternally in mankind. I desire no offerings at my tomb and no immortality for my name. This was written by Sinuhe, the Egyptian, who lived alone all the days of his life.

—MIKA WALTARI, The Egyptian