Finnish Language

Finnish Language, one of the Finno-Ugric languages, spoken by people in Finland. Since 1809 it has been an official language (along with Swedish) of Finland and (with Karelian) of the republic of Karelia in Russia. Closely related to Estonian, Finnish is more distantly related to Saami and to Hungarian. These form a subgroup of the family of Uralic languages.

Written records of Finnish date from the 16th century, when the New Testament was translated. The publication in 1835 of Elias Lönnrot's folk epic the Kalevala fueled the nationalist movement, which called for Finnish to replace Swedish as the official language of the government and the educated classes.

Characteristic of Finnish is a system of vowel harmony, in which the front vowels ä [æ], ö [ø], and y [y] do not occur in the same word as the back vowels a [ ], o [o], and u [u]. A differentiation between short and long vowels and consonants is reflected in the orthography—for example, i (short) and ii (long), or p and pp. This differentiation produces differences in meaning, as in the words laki (law) and lakki (cap). There is also a system of consonant gradation, in which the consonant of a word stem changes according to the stress of the previous vowel and the type of syllable that follows. Finnish has a number of noun cases, negative verbs, and an extensive system of suffixes.