Finnish

Finnish

The Finnish language belongs to the Finno-Ugric group, which is a part of the Uralic language family. Today 7 million people speak it worldwide. It`s the official language of Finland and the EU, it`s common in Sweden, and you can find it in Norway and Russia, in the latter case –especially in the border areas.

There are 2 versions of Finnish: literary and spoken. Moreover, they are quite different. The spoken one changes faster and it`s easier to understand. Literary is used in documents, in the framework of business communication, and for official speeches of politicians and public figures. However, it has increasingly influenced the spoken language lately.

Finnish writing is based on the Latin alphabet. The rules of reading are very simple because the pronunciation and the graphic representation of the sound perfectly match each other, everything is quite unambiguous.

Features of the Finnish language

The loanwords in Finnish occur completely, it means that the letters in the words are the same as in the original, even not being in the alphabet. And this sometimes can be confusing.

The first syllable in Finnish is always stressed. The languages are not enriched with a variety of intonations. Most of the structures are characterized by a descending structure, and their communication load is rather weak.

But Finnish has many cases: there are 16 of them! They are formed by adding standard endings, and all names are declined in the same way. It`s important to notice, that the number of cases will gradually decrease, even now you can see this steady trend. There is no gender and future tense in Finnish. Besides, there are no familiar Russian-language sounds (“ч”(ch), “ш”(sh), “з”(z), and “ж”(zh)).

Finnish continues forming under the influence of different languages. It has been enriching by loanwords from a number of Slavic languages, especially from Russian, German, and Swedish.

Finnish has many vowels, and it differs from other languages spoken in Europe. There is even a legend, that Tolkien laid Finnish as the foundation for his idea of the elves language. We also should note the melody of the language.