45 Facts About Finnish language

Finnish language is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation.

Finnish language is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland.

The varieties of Finnish found in Norway's Finnmark and in northern Sweden (namely Meankieli) have the status of official minority languages, and thus can be considered distinct languages from Finnish.

Today, Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland, and has been an official language of the European Union since 1995.

However, the Finnish language did not have an official status in the country during the period of Swedish rule, which ended in 1809.

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Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Finnish have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs.

Uralic family of languages, of which Finnish is a member, are hypothesized to derive from a single ancestor language termed Proto-Uralic, spoken sometime between 8, 000 and 2, 000 BCE in the vicinity of the Ural mountains.

The first known written example of Finnish itself is found in a German travel journal dating back to c 1450:.

Finnish was considered inferior to Swedish, and Finnish speakers were second-class members of society because they could not use their language in any official situations.

Along the way, Finnish language lost several fricative consonants in a process of sound change.

The sounds and disappeared from the Finnish language, surviving only in a small rural region in Western Finland.

Ever since the days of Mikael Agricola, written Finnish had been used almost exclusively in religious contexts, but now Snellman's Hegelian nationalistic ideas of Finnish as a fully-fledged national language gained considerable support.

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 first novel written in Finnish language was Seven Brothers (), published by Aleksis Kivi in 1870.

Finnish language has been changing in certain ways after World War II, as observed in the spreading of certain dialectal features, for example the spread of the Western dialectal variant for the written cluster ts and the Eastern disappearance of d ( 'I know' instead of ) and the simultaneous preference to abandon the more visible dialectal features.

Dialects of Finnish language are divided into two distinct groups, Western and Eastern.

Meankieli is a northern dialect almost entirely intelligible to speakers of any other Finnish dialect, which achieved its status as an official minority language in Sweden for historical and political reasons, although Finnish is an official minority language in Sweden, too.

Southwest Finnish language dialects are spoken in Southwest Finland and Satakunta.

The categorization of Meankieli as a separate language is controversial among some Finns, who see no linguistic criteria, only political reasons, for treating Meankieli differently from other dialects of Finnish.

Language spoken in those parts of Karelia that have not historically been under Swedish or Finnish rule is usually called the Karelian language, and it is considered to be more distant from standard Finnish than the Eastern dialects.

The standard Finnish language is used in formal situations like political speeches and newscasts.

Standard Finnish is prescribed by the Language Office of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland and is the language used in official communication.

An updated dictionary, The New Dictionary of Modern Finnish language was published in an electronic form in 2004 and in print in 2006.

Standard Finnish is used in official texts and is the form of language taught in schools.

Colloquial language has mostly developed naturally from earlier forms of Finnish, and spread from the main cultural and political centres.

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The standard Finnish language, however, has always been a consciously constructed medium for literature.

The colloquial Finnish language develops significantly faster, and the grammatical and phonological changes include the most common pronouns and suffixes, which amount to frequent but modest differences.

Phoneme inventory of Finnish language is moderately small, with a great number of vocalic segments and a restricted set of consonant types, both of which can be long or short.

Finnish language monophthongs show eight vowel qualities that contrast in duration, thus 16 vowel phonemes in total.

Usual analysis is that Finnish language has long and short vowels and consonants as distinct phonemes.

Finnish language has a consonant inventory of small to moderate size, where voicing is mostly not distinctive, and fricatives are scarce.

Finnish language has only two fricatives in native words, namely and.

Proto-Uralic had only "a" and "i" and their vowel harmonic allophones in non-initial syllables; modern Finnish language allows other vowels in non-initial syllables, although they are uncommon compared to "a", "a" and "i".

Characteristic features of Finnish are vowel harmony and an agglutinative morphology; owing to the extensive use of the latter, words can be quite long.

Finnish language has several morphophonological processes that require modification of the forms of words for daily speech.

Finnish is a synthetic language that employs extensive agglutination of affixes to verbs, nouns, adjectives and numerals.

Morphosyntactic alignment of Finnish language is nominative–accusative, but there are two object cases: accusative and partitive.

Finnish language has three grammatical persons; finite verbs agree with subject nouns in person and number by way of suffixes.

Finnish language has a smaller core vocabulary than, for example, English, and uses derivational suffixes to a greater extent.

These words are usually regarded as the last remnant of the Paleo-European Finnish language spoken in Fennoscandia before the arrival of the proto-Finnic Finnish language.

When Finnish was accepted as an official language, it gained legal equal status with Swedish.

English loan words in Finnish language slang include for example "PlayStation", "hot dog", and "headache", "headshot" or "headbutt".

Finnish language is written with the Latin alphabet including the distinct characters a and o, and several characters reserved for words of non-Finnish language origin.

The Finnish orthography follows the phoneme principle: each phoneme of the language corresponds to exactly one grapheme (independent letter), and each grapheme represents almost exactly one phoneme.

The rule of thumb for Finnish language orthography is write as you read, read as you write.

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