en.wikipedia.org
- Finnish belongs to the small Finno-Ugric family of languages. The closest “relatives” in this language family are Estonian and Hungarian. In comparison, most of the other languages spoken around Europe belong to the Indo-European languages.
Uncovering the Finnish Language: Basics + Where to Start?
herfinland.com/finnish-language-basics/#:~:text=Finnish belongs to the small Finno-Ugric family of,spoken around Europe belong to the Indo-European languages.
People also ask
What language is spoken in Finland?
Is the Finnish language similar to Russian?
Where does the Finnish language come from?
What is the difference between Finnish and Swedish?
The most distinct Finnic language is Livonian, which has undergone massive phonological changes. If Kven and Meänkieli are considered independent languages (as they are in Norway and Sweden), they are the closest languages to Finnish, and they can also be seen as a part of the Finnish far-northern dialects.
Classification. Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages. The Finnic group also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in Russia's Republic of Karelia.
A simple answer to both questions is no. Both Swedish (one of the two official languages of Finland) and Russian belong to the Indo-European group of languages, while Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language.
Nov 03, 2010 · Favorite Answer Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, which is strangely not related to any of the major European languages. It's closely related to Estonian, and more distantly to Saami (or Lappish)...
Finnish belongs to the small Finno-Ugric family of languages. The closest “relatives” in this language family are Estonian and Hungarian. In comparison, most of the other languages spoken around Europe belong to the Indo-European languages.
- Swedish. Swedish is spoken by the most people amongst all the five Nordic languages – 10 million people. Swedish — Sweden’s national language and one of Finland’s national language — and Danish are written in a similar manner.
- Danish. Spoken by five million speakers and the official language of Denmark, Danish is also the second official spoken the language of the Faroese Islands and Greenland.
- Norwegian. About five million people speak Norwegian today, and because of its history, it shares many similarities between Swedish and Danish. In fact, a Norwegian can easily hold a conversation with a Swede and a Dane.
- Icelandic. Icelandic is perhaps the only one of the Nordic languages that closely resembles old Norse which was spoken by the Vikings. With only three hundred fifty thousand native speakers, this language is the least spoken language of all the North Germanic languages.
- Finnish is gender neutral. Finnish does not have grammatical gender, like some European languages, so there’s no need to remember whether table is masculine or feminine, for example.
- There is no future tense in Finnish. The future tense does not exist in Finnish; you just use the present tense. This is a lot more practical than it might sound: if there’s any chance of confusion, you simply add words like varmaan (“probably”) or kohta (“soon”), huomenna (“tomorrow”) or kun lehmät lentävät (“when cows fly” – Finnish goes for cows over pigs in this case) to specify that the action is (or is not) happening in the future.
- East versus West. Finnish has several mutually intelligible dialects that are broadly divided into two groups: Western and Eastern. The dialects differ in vocabulary and intonation, but there are some differences in the grammar and morphology, too.
- Finnish is pronounced like it’s written. Finnish has very regular pronunciation; usually, there is almost 100% correspondence between letters and sounds.
Dec 30, 2009 · Estonian is closest to Finnish and they are mutually intelligible. Although thousands of years separate the split of their languages, Hungarians find it relatively easy to learn Finnish and Finns...
- Finnish did not originate with the Finns. The roots of the Finnish language are not the same as those of the Finnish people. Finns are believed to originate from what is now Turkey, while Finnish is a Uralic language, which comes from the Ural Mountains in Russia.
- The oldest piece of written Finnish is a spell. Some Finnish words still in use today date back 4,000 years. It’s unclear where and when the written version of the language came from, but the oldest known piece of written Finnish dates from around the mid-1200s and was found in Novgorod, which is now Russia.
- The Finnish alphabet isn’t Finnish. Finland’s alphabet consists of 29 letters. As well as the standard Roman alphabet (the same one used by English), it adds ‘Å’ and ‘Ö’ from the Swedish alphabet and ‘Ä’ (pronounced ‘ahh’ as in ‘apple’).
- Finnish literature was popularised by one man. The first novel written and published in Finnish is believed to be Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers (or Seitsemän Veljestä in the original Finnish) in 1870.