Language
The official languages are Finnish and Swedish. Sami has official status within the Sami home region. Finnish is a language that belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages. Finno-Ugric tribes reachedarrived into Finland both from east and from south. Another member of the Finno-Ugric tribes, Hungarians, travelled a different path and were the last greater ethnic group to arrive in Europe. Today, there are several dozens small Finno-Ugric nations (all small) settled in North Europe, in the Volga and Ural region, and in Siberia and the Russian Far North. Finno-Ugric languages are today spoken by a total of about 20 million peoples (mostly by Hungarians ca.13 millions, Finns ca.5 millions, ca.1 million Estonians and the rest being smaller tribes) (Humphreys, 1999).
People often guess that Finnish must be similar to Russian. This is not so. Contrarily to most of the languages spoken in Europe, the Finno-Ugric languages are not part of the Indo-European family of languages. Thus, Finnish is related neither to the Slavic languages such as Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, or Polish, nor to the Germanic languages such as German, Dutch, or Swedish, nor to the Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian. Not mentioning the Romance languages such as French, Italian, or Romanian (Institute of the Estonian Language, 2001).
In Finland 93% of the population speaks Finnish as the mother tongue. Swedish as mother tongue is spoken by a little bit less than 6% and Sami by 0.03%.
Closest to Finnish is the Estonian language: the separation of Estonian and Finnish into different languages began less than two thousand years ago and that is a relatively short time in the history of a language. Finnish is also related to several tiny ethnic groups living in the St. Petersburg region such as Karelian, Vepsan, Ingerian, the practically extinct Livonian (Institute of the Estonian Language, 2001). Most Estonians, especially those who live in the northern part of the country can understand quite a bit of Finnish, whereas the Finns have more difficulties to learn to understand Estonian. There are many similar words in Finnish and Estonian but often with different meaning.
In the table below you will find some few exampels on words that may cause confusions when a Finn discusses with an Estonian - same word but different meaning.
Source: (Vool, 1991).
The relationship between Finnish and Hungarian is completely different. It only means that they belong to the same linguistical family, it is at the closest something like how the English language is related to the German language. Very few words are alike, here some few examples that can be found:
Source: Pauli Kruhse's homepage, 2001
Finnish language is phonetic and the stress is always on the first syllable of the word. Once you have mastered pronunciation it is easy to use a phrase book. Double vowels are pronounced at twice the length of a single vowel, and double consonants are also doubly pronounced (Humphreys, 1999). The Finnish language is characterized by fine shades of meaning, sometimes hard to translate precisely, and an affection for natural phenomena, with many onomatopoeic words for natural sounds (words that are like natural sounds, as when the word CUCKOO is used to name the bird that makes the sound). The most common vowel in finnish is /a/. Finnish words can be long such as the number 9999:
9999 = yhdeksäntuhattayhdeksänsataayhdeksänkymmentäyhdeksän
Listen to how 9999 is pronounced in Finnish [WAV, 1 MB]
and there may be many vowels in the word such as
Älkää rääkkää sitä koiraa! - Emme rääkkääkkään!
Listen to how the sentence is pronounced in Finnish [WAV, 1 MB]
(The sentence above says: Do not torment that dog! - I am not tormenting it!)
One must also bear in mind that it is as difficult for a Finn to learn foreign languages as for a foreigner to learn Finnish.
Arto Paasilinna is today one of Finland's most successful novelists. His books have been translated into at least a dozen languages, among them English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and Japanese, making him accessible to a worldwide readership, as few Finnish writers before him have been. His most successful work, familiar to Finns from a film version, is probably The year of the hare (1977). In it, the burned-out hero tires of his treadmill existence in rush-hour southern Finland and, with a young hare for companion, heads back to nature to perform feats of daring, of the humanistic type, of course, in that third sense of showing an interest in the welfare of people.