The Finnish Language

Finnish is the mother tongue for the vast majority of Finns and is also spoken throughout other parts of Scandinavia, Russia and indeed the rest of the world. It is an official language of both Finland and the EU, and a minority language of Sweden. There are various dialects spoken from the Baltic Sea to Norway.

Finnish developed from the Sami group of languages which originated from northern Scandinavia. It is notorious for being difficult for native speakers of Indo-European languages to learn as there are very few similarities between corresponding vocabularies. The array of inflections and postpositions don’t help in this matter, which may seem alien to those who are only familiar with Western European languages.

The Finnish language was an illiterate language until a clergyman named Mikael Agricola devised a written system for it. He has since been referred to as the father of written Finnish. He originally wanted to translate the Bible into Finnish, but he soon found that he had to devise spelling rules and basic semantics, besides coining new words altogether. The result of this development is that written Finnish is largely phonetic – its pronunciation is highly predictable from its spelling.

Finnish gave us the word ’sauna’. If you want to learn more Finnish words, you may be interested in visiting this site.

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