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What language family does Finnish belong to?

Finnish (Finnish: Suomi kieli; English: Finnish language) is one of the two official languages ​​of Finland and an official minority language of Sweden. Finnish is an agglutinative language belonging to the Finnish-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, and is a relative language with Estonian and Hungarian.

Finnish is spoken by most of Finland’s population, as well as by a small diaspora of the Finnish diaspora. Finnish has few consonants, long words, rich vowels, and a very complex grammar with 15 declensions.

Uralic language family — Finnish language, Finnish Suomi, member of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family, spoken in Finland.

Basic Features

The basic rule in Finnish is to add endings to root words. For example, the root auto (car) can be formed by adding the endings -i (sign of “plurality”), -ssa (indative case ending), -si (genitive ending) and -kin (also, particle) after it. “plural of cars” autoi, “in cars” autossa, “your car” autosi, and “cars too” autokin.

Finnish verb forms are formed in the same way, such as the verb root sano (to say), by adding the ending -n to indicate that the subject is in the first person, -i for past tense, and -han for emphasis.

Although adding endings to roots is characteristic of many European languages, Finnish differs from most other languages ​​in two ways:

First, Finnish generally has more case endings than other European languages. Case endings are generally equivalent to prepositions or postpositions in other languages. For example, the suffix -ssa is generally equivalent to the preposition “in” in English. Finnish has about fourteen cases, while English has only one possessive case.

Second, where case is used in Finnish, Indo-European languages ​​tend to use a separate word for it. For example, Finnish genitive suffixes are equivalent to English possessive pronouns. A special set of endings in Finnish are particle particles, which always come after all other endings. It’s not easy to say exactly what they mean, but they have a strong effect. For example, it expresses the meaning of emphatic tone, interrogative tone and “also”.

Finnish also differs from most Indo-European languages ​​(but this is the same as Indo-European English) in that it has no “(feminine/masculine) gender” category. Such as “der-die-das” in German and “le-la” in French.

Finnish also has no articles. The meaning of articles in Finnish is often expressed through word order.

When Finnish adjectives are used as attributives, they must be consistent with the central word in number and case, and have corresponding affixes.

History

The earliest documents written in Finnish appeared in the early 16th century, when Bishop Mikael Agricola of Turku translated part of the Bible into Finnish. It was not until the 16th century that many Finnish writers began to write in Finnish, but important documents were still written in Latin.

Finland was subordinate to Sweden until 1809, and then until 1917 Finland was the Grand Duchy of Tsarist Russia. During Finland’s subordination to Sweden, Finnish was only a second language. It was not until 1863 that Finnish was decreed by the government to have the same status as Swedish in matters directly related to the inhabitants of which Finnish is the language.

Agra Koala uses dh and d to represent voiced tongue-dental fricatives (equivalent to th in this in English), and tz and z to represent voiceless tongue-dental fricatives (equivalent to th in English in thanks), and later the pronunciation has changed. change, the lingual fricative has disappeared in Finnish, dh has become j and v in eastern dialects, r or l in western dialects, tz has become ht or tt; he uses gh and g to represent voiced velar fricative, but this has also disappeared; he used Ch, c or h for the voiceless velar fricative, which has become a laryngeal h; Agrigola coined many words, he used about 8500 60% of the words are still in use.

Finnish has been influenced by Swedish for a long time, especially vocabulary. Since Turku was established as the capital, it can be said that the standard language of Finnish has developed from the basis of the southwestern dialect. Influences from Eastern Finland were added in the 19th century.

Nationalist movements also had some influence on the Finnish language. Many linguists want to “Finnishize” Finnish, which means discarding Swedish loanwords and some grammatical structures borrowed directly from Swedish.

Geographic Distribution

People who use Finnish are mainly distributed in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia and Russia, and some immigrants in the United States use it as a daily language, mainly in Michigan.