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92-705: Finland's current constitutional provisions are enshrined in a single statute: the Constitution of Finland (731/1999). Before the enshrinement, the Finnish constitutional provisions were divided between four separate statutes, which all had a constitutional status; the Constitution Act of 1919, also known in English as the Instrument of Government , ( Finnish : Suomen hallitusmuoto ; Swedish : Regeringsformen för Finland ),

184-803: A "j", e.g. vesj [vesʲ] "water", cf. standard vesi [vesi] . The first known written account in Helsinki slang is from the 1890 short story Hellaassa by young Santeri Ivalo (words that do not exist in, or deviate from, the standard spoken Finnish of its time are in bold): Kun minä eilen illalla palasin labbiksesta , tapasin Aasiksen kohdalla Supiksen , ja niin me laskeusimme tänne Espikselle , jossa oli mahoton hyvä piikis . Mutta me mentiin Studikselle suoraan Hudista tapaamaan, ja jäimme sinne pariksi tunniksi, kunnes ajoimme Kaisikseen . There are two main registers of Finnish used throughout

276-656: A Decree only if this re-delegation is explicitly allowed in an Act. However, the principles governing the rights and obligations of private individuals and the other matters that under the Constitution are of a legislative nature shall be governed by Acts. § 80, in essence, sets up the boundaries on how the Parliament may give up its legislative power. The Constitution, indeed, delegates several issues to be governed by ordinary Acts. These laws are not considered constitutional laws, although they concern constitutional rights. An example

368-449: A Decree, but this provision has been repealed and the responsibility for maintaining the constitutionality of the laws now rests completely with the Parliament. Finnish language Finnish ( endonym : suomi [ˈsuo̯mi] or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li] ) is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of

460-654: A Government bill. The Commission completed its work on 17 June 1997, and during 1998, the bill was considered by the Constitutional Law Committee, which finally produced its unanimous report on the bill in January 1999. On 12 February, Parliament gave its approval for the Committee's proposal for the new Constitution to be left in abeyance until after the parliamentary elections. The new Parliament elected in March 1999 approved

552-617: A Government comprising the Prime Minister and the Ministers who form the Government (Chapter 5) the Parliament of Finland (Chapter 3). It also establishes an independent judiciary and two judicial systems: one general, and the other administrative. One of the main goals of the constitutional reform process was to move Finland away from a semi-presidential system and further in the direction of

644-551: A Latin-script alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, and is phonemic to a great extent. Vowel length and consonant length are distinguished, and there are a range of diphthongs , although vowel harmony limits which diphthongs are possible. Finnish belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family ; as such, it is one of the few European languages that is not Indo-European . The Finnic branch also includes Estonian and

736-418: A considerable influence upon the spoken word, because illiteracy is nonexistent and many Finns are avid readers. In fact, it is still not entirely uncommon to meet people who "talk book-ish" ( puhuvat kirjakieltä ); it may have connotations of pedantry, exaggeration, moderation, weaseling or sarcasm (somewhat like heavy use of Latinate words in English, or more old-fashioned or "pedantic" constructions: compare

828-508: A few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in Russia's Republic of Karelia . The closest relative of Finnish is either Ingrian , or depending on the definition, Karelian . Finnic languages form a dialect continuum, where for instance Finnish and Estonian are not separated by any single isogloss that would separate dialects considered "Finnish" from those considered "Estonian", despite

920-455: A language of administration, journalism, literature, and science in Finland, along with Swedish. In 1853 Daniel Europaeus published the first Swedish-Finnish dictionary, and between 1866 and 1880 Elias Lönnrot compiled the first Finnish-Swedish dictionary. In the same period, Antero Warelius conducted ethnographic research and, among other topics, he documented the geographic distribution of

1012-506: A minority of Finnish descent. Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation . Nouns , adjectives , pronouns , numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in the sentence . Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows them to be ordered differently. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information structure . Finnish orthography uses

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1104-468: A more systematic writing system. Along the way, Finnish lost several fricative consonants in a process of sound change . The sounds [ð] and [θ(ː)] disappeared from the language, surviving only in a small rural region in Western Finland. In the standard language, however, the effect of the lost sounds is thus: Modern Finnish punctuation, along with that of Swedish, uses the colon (:) to separate

1196-495: A multitude of institutional possibilities. In each case, however, popular sovereignty assumes the existence of some form of popular consent, and it is for this reason that every definition of republican government implies a theory of consent. The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. American revolutionaries aimed to substitute

1288-445: A north–south split as well as an east–west split. The northern dialects of Proto-Finnic, from which Finnish developed, lacked the mid vowel [ ɤ ] . This vowel was found only in the southern dialects, which developed into Estonian , Livonian , and Votian . The northern variants used third person singular pronoun hän instead of southern tämä (Est. tema ). While the eastern dialects of Proto-Finnic (which developed in

1380-475: A parliamentary system of government. Accordingly, the new Constitution strengthens the position of Parliament as the highest organ of government and makes it easier for the legislature to carry out its work — this despite the fact that the new Constitution's provisions on the organization and procedures of Parliament contain no fundamental changes in terms of content, and the legal provisions on Parliament and Representatives remain largely unchanged. Importantly, under

1472-458: A principle, does not imply any particular political implementation. Benjamin Franklin expressed the concept when he wrote that "In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns". In Defensor pacis , Marsilius of Padua advocated a form of republicanism that views the people as the only legitimate source of political authority. Sovereignty lies with

1564-512: A proposal for the structure of the new Constitution. After the Working Group had delivered its report, in 1996 the Government appointed the Constitution 2000 Commission to draft a proposal for a new, integrated Constitution to come into force on 1 March 2000. The Commission was instructed to draft its proposal for a new Constitution to replace the four existing constitutional laws in the form of

1656-546: A separate taxonomic " Finno-Samic " node is controversial. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , United States, classifies Finnish as a level III language (of four levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers. Finnish is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland. There are also notable Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Canada, and

1748-440: A total amount of Finnish-speakers roughly between 7,200 and 15,600. In the latest census , around 1000 people in Russia claimed to speak Finnish natively; however, a larger amount of 14,000 claimed to be able to speak Finnish in total. There are also forms of Finnish spoken by diasporas outside Europe, such as American Finnish , spoken by Finnish Americans , and Siberian Finnish , spoken by Siberian Finns . Today, Finnish

1840-503: Is abbreviation of word-final vowels, and in many respects they resemble Estonian. The Tavastian dialects ( hämäläismurteet ) are spoken in Tavastia . They are closest to the standard language, but feature some slight vowel changes, such as the opening of diphthong-final vowels ( tie → tiä , miekka → miakka , kuolisi → kualis ), the change of d to l (mostly obsolete) or trilled r (widespread, nowadays disappearance of d

1932-440: Is not determined by the judiciary , but it is, instead, reviewed by the Parliament's own Constitutional Law Committee that consists of MPs. This structure is, however, not unusual among democratic nations. The Netherlands , Sweden and Switzerland are other such countries where constitutional review is performed by the legislature itself or a committee within it. The current Finnish Constitution expressly (section 106) directs

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2024-591: Is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish), 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. After the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Finland , and against the backdrop of the Fennoman movement , the language obtained its official status in

2116-727: Is popular) and the personal pronouns ( me: meitin ('we: our'), te: teitin ('you: your') and he: heitin ('they: their')). The South Ostrobothnian dialects ( eteläpohjalaismurteet ) are spoken in Southern Ostrobothnia . Their most notable feature is the pronunciation of "d" as a tapped or even fully trilled /r/ . The Central and North Ostrobothnian dialects ( keski- ja pohjoispohjalaismurteet ) are spoken in Central and Northern Ostrobothnia . The Lapland dialects ( lappilaismurteet ) are spoken in Lapland . The dialects spoken in

2208-630: Is the universal obligation to participate in national defence which is provided in § 127 in two sentences, both of which delegate to regular legislation: Every Finnish citizen is obligated to participate or assist in national defence, as provided by an Act. Provisions on the right to exemption, on grounds of conscience, from participation in military national defence are laid down by an Act. The constitutional system in Finland has been criticized for missing any de facto mechanism of independent constitutional review , as well as failing to adequately guarantee separation of powers . The constitutionality of laws

2300-632: The Act on the High Court of Impeachment of 1922 ( Finnish : laki valtakunnanoikeudesta ; Swedish : Lag om riksrätten ). All these statutes were merged into a single constitution and repealed with the passage thereof. The fundamental principles of the Constitution Act of 1919 and the Parliament Act of 1906, amended in 1928, remained unchanged during the first fifty years of Finnish independence, as there

2392-500: The European convention on human rights , including the educational, social and economic rights in addition to political liberties. The international human rights obligations of Finland are set as the highest legal norm of the law, even above the constitution. The Constitution establishes a government under a parliamentary system . It provides for a directly elected President of the Republic,

2484-594: The Finnish Diet of 1863. Finnish also enjoys the status of an official minority language in Sweden . 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. However, concerns have been expressed about

2576-638: The Parliament Act of 1928 ( Finnish : valtiopäiväjärjestys ; Swedish : riksdagsordningen ), the Ministerial Responsibility Act of 1922 ( Finnish : laki eduskunnan oikeudesta tarkastaa valtioneuvoston jäsenten ja oikeuskanslerin sekä eduskunnan oikeusasiamiehen virkatointen lainmukaisuutta , short title ministerivastuulaki ; Swedish : Lag om rätt för riksdagen att granska lagenligheten av statsrådsmedlemmarnas och justitiekanslerns samt riksdagens justitieombudsmans ämbetsåtgärder ) and

2668-521: The Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga . The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar. Despite having overlapping geographical distributions, Finnic languages and Sami languages are not closely related, and the hypothesis of

2760-506: The stem of a word and its grammatical ending in some cases, for example after acronyms , as in EU:ssa 'in the EU'. (This contrasts with some other alphabetic writing systems, which would use other symbols, such as e.g. apostrophe, hyphen.) Since suffixes play a prominent role in the language, this use of the colon is quite common. In the 19th century Johan Vilhelm Snellman and others began to stress

2852-428: The 1990s, the need to integrate and update the constitutional legislation was seen as urgent. For instance, while in most other European countries constitutional provisions are all contained within a single constitutional act, in Finland, they were fragmented and contained across several acts. The process of constitutional reform began in the late 1990s, after Finland's accession to the European Union , partly because of

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2944-466: The Constitution and it may be repealed like an ordinary act. Exceptive laws were formerly much used, even to the point of threatening to undermine respect for Constitutional provisions. Today, their use is limited. The first major constitutional reform came in 1983, with the re-writing of many important provisions governing parliamentary procedure, mostly in the Parliament Act. However, the most extensive and important reforms came in 1987, when provisions on

3036-453: The Finnish dialects. The most important contributions to improving the status of Finnish were made by Elias Lönnrot . His impact on the development of modern vocabulary in Finnish was particularly significant. In addition to compiling the Kalevala , he acted as an arbiter in disputes about the development of standard Finnish between the proponents of western and eastern dialects, ensuring that

3128-610: The President was introduced, with provision for a second ballot where necessary. The new system was used for the first time in 1994. The President's term of office was also limited to two consecutive terms of six years, and the President's powers were limited to only dissolving Parliament on receipt of a reasoned request from the Prime Minister and having first consulted the Speaker and the party groups in Parliament. The 1991 reform also amended

3220-543: The Salamancans saw sovereignty as emanating originally from God . However, unlike the divine right theorists and in agreement with Locke, they saw it as passing from God to all people equally, not only to monarchs . Republics and popular monarchies are theoretically based on popular sovereignty. However, a legalistic notion of popular sovereignty does not necessarily imply an effective, functioning democracy . A party or even an individual dictator may claim to represent

3312-674: The United States. The majority of the population of Finland (90.37% as of 2010 ) speak Finnish as their first language . The remainder speak Swedish (5.42%), one of the Sámi languages (for example Northern , Inari , or Skolt ), or another language as their first language. Finnish is spoken as a second language in Estonia by about 167,000 people. The Finnic varities found in Norway's Finnmark (namely Kven ) and in northern Sweden (namely Meänkieli ) have

3404-468: The advice of the Prime Minister. Under the Parliament Act, Parliament has traditionally been entitled to receive from the Government and the relevant ministries whatever information it needs to carry out its functions, while the parliamentary committees have enjoyed a similar right to be provided with information and reports on matters within their purview. The new Constitution extends Parliament's right to be informed by giving individual Members of Parliament

3496-464: The affirmation of Finland's status as a sovereign Republic, the inviolability of human dignity and the rights of the individual, and the sovereignty of the Finnish people . It also affirms the principle of representative democracy and the position of Parliament as the highest organ of government, the separation of powers , the independence of the courts, and the principle of parliamentary government. The provisions for constitutional rights closely mirror

3588-437: The appointment of the Prime Minister from the President to Parliament. The new Constitution thus marked the end of the President's leading role in the formation of the Government. The President now only takes a prominent role when the parliamentary groups are unable to reach agreement on a suitable basis and programme for the Government, and on a suitable candidate for Prime Minister. § 80 provides that an issue can be governed by

3680-474: The arguments which had emerged between the Parliament and the President when arrangements were being made for decision-making in European affairs, such as whether the President should participate in the meetings of the European Council together with the Prime Minister. In 1995, a working group of experts, called the Constitution 2000 Working Group, was appointed to examine the need to consolidate and update

3772-524: The border created between Sweden and Finland in 1809 when Russia annexed Finland. This caused the speakers of Meänkieli to be isolated from the developments of standard Finnish and instead be influenced by the Swedish language. However, it is still mutually integible with Finnish, and is thus sometimes considered a dialect of the Finnish language. The Kven language is spoken in Finnmark and Troms , in Norway. Its speakers are descendants of Finnish emigrants to

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3864-451: The colloquial language) ei kö teillä ole e(i) ks teil(lä) oo "don't you (pl.) have (it)?" (compare eiks to standard Estonian confirmatory interrogative eks ) Sovereignty of the people Popular sovereignty is the principle that the leaders of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political legitimacy. Popular sovereignty, being

3956-409: The confidence of Parliament, is given a greater role in presidential decision-making. The most notable change was the transfer of the final decision on the introduction and withdrawal of Government bills from the President of the Republic to the Government, this including bills in the area of foreign affairs. In relation to the formation of the Government, the provisions of the new Constitution transfer

4048-545: The constitutional legislation. The Working Group proposed that all constitutional provisions be brought together into a single statute and concluded that the most important questions of constitutional law to be addressed in the reform were the reduction of the scope of constitutional regulation, the development of relations between the highest organs of government, the clarification of questions of power and responsibility in international affairs, and constitutional recognition of European Union membership. The Working Group also drew up

4140-404: The country. One is the "standard language" ( yleiskieli ), and the other is the " spoken language " ( puhekieli ). The standard language is used in formal situations like political speeches and newscasts. Its written form, the "book language" ( kirjakieli ), is used in nearly all written texts, not always excluding even the dialogue of common people in popular prose. The spoken language, on

4232-530: The courts to give precedence to the provisions of the Constitution if they are in an evident conflict with provisions of ordinary laws in some particular case, but the courts may not strike down Acts or pronounce on their constitutionality. The old constitutional acts also directed the Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court to request, if needed, the explication or amendment of an Act or

4324-478: The difference between saying "There's no children I'll leave it to" and "There are no children to whom I shall leave it"). More common is the intrusion of typically literary constructions into a colloquial discourse, as a kind of quote from written Finnish. It is quite common to hear book-like and polished speech on radio or TV, and the constant exposure to such language tends to lead to the adoption of such constructions even in everyday language. A prominent example of

4416-557: The doctrine of popular sovereignty receives particular emphasis in American history, notes historian Christian G. Fritz's American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War , a study of the early history of American constitutionalism. In describing how Americans attempted to apply this doctrine prior to the territorial struggle over slavery that led to the Civil War, political scientist Donald S. Lutz noted

4508-445: The effect of the standard language is the development of the consonant gradation form /ts   : ts/ as in metsä : metsän , as this pattern was originally (1940) found natively only in the dialects of the southern Karelian isthmus and Ingria . It has been reinforced by the spelling "ts" for the dental fricative [θː] , used earlier in some western dialects. The spelling and the pronunciation this encourages however approximate

4600-551: The formal. However, in signalling the former in writing, syncope and sandhi – especially internal – may occasionally amongst other characteristics be transcribed, e.g. menenpä → me(n)empä . This never occurs in the standard variety. he mene vät ne mene e "they go" loss of a number contrast on verbs in the 3rd person ( menee is 3rd person singular in the formal language) ( minä) o le n mä o o n "I am" or "I will be" and no pro-drop (i.e., personal pronouns are usually mandatory in

4692-446: The future status of Finnish in Sweden, for example, where reports produced for the Swedish government during 2017 show that minority language policies are not being respected, particularly for the 7% of Finns settled in the country. The 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 (estimates vary) in

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4784-456: The grammatical and phonological changes also include the most common pronouns and suffixes, which amount to frequent but modest differences. Some sound changes have been left out of the formal language. For example, irregular verbs have developed in the spoken language as a result of the elision of sonorants in some verbs of the Type III class (with subsequent vowel assimilation ), but only when

4876-489: The holding of consultative referendums were added to the Constitution. The indirect form of electing the President of the Republic via an Electoral College was replaced by a system which combined the Electoral College with direct election, and the provisions governing the postponement of ordinary legislation were amended by shortening the period for which a bill could be postponed. In 1991, the direct popular election of

4968-534: The idea of the " general will ". The central tenet of popular sovereignty is that the legitimacy of a government's authority and of its laws is based on the consent of the governed . Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all held that individuals enter into a social contract, voluntarily giving up some of their natural freedom, so as to secure protection from the dangers inherent in the freedom of others. Whether men are seen as naturally more prone to violence and rapine (Hobbes) or to cooperation and kindness (Rousseau),

5060-474: The idea that a legitimate social order emerges only when liberties and duties are equal among citizens binds the social contract thinkers to the concept of popular sovereignty. An earlier development of the theory of popular sovereignty is found among the School of Salamanca (see e.g. Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) or Francisco Suarez (1548–1617)). Like the theorists of the divine right of kings and Locke,

5152-470: The language, which he based on Swedish, German, and Latin. The Finnish standard language still relies on his innovations with regard to spelling, though Agricola used less systematic spelling than is used today. Though Agricola's intention was that each phoneme (and allophone under qualitative consonant gradation ) should correspond to one letter, he failed to achieve this goal in various respects. For example, k , c , and q were all used for

5244-415: The main cultural and political centres. The standard language, however, has always been a consciously constructed medium for literature. It preserves grammatical patterns that have mostly vanished from the colloquial varieties and, as its main application is writing, it features complex syntactic patterns that are not easy to handle when used in speech. The colloquial language develops significantly faster, and

5336-411: The modern-day eastern Finnish dialects, Veps, Karelian, and Ingrian) formed genitive plural nouns via plural stems (e.g., eastern Finnish kalojen < * kaloi -ten ), the western dialects of Proto-Finnic (today's Estonian, Livonian and western Finnish varieties) used the non-plural stems (e.g., Est. kalade < * kala -ten ). Another defining characteristic of the east–west split

5428-607: The most part, the dialects operate on the same phonology and grammar. There are only marginal examples of sounds or grammatical constructions specific to some dialect and not found in standard Finnish. Two examples are the voiced dental fricative found in the Rauma dialect , and the Eastern exessive case . The Southwest Finnish dialects ( lounaissuomalaismurteet ) are spoken in Southwest Finland and Satakunta . Their typical feature

5520-419: The need to improve the status of Finnish. 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

5612-540: The new Constitution in June that year and it was ratified by the President of the Republic. The Constitution has since been amended a number of times, notably in 2011 to allow bills to be introduced in Parliament by popular petition and in 2017 to expand the access of police and intelligence services to private communications. The official text of the constitution consists of 131 Sections, divided into 13 Chapters, as follows: The opening chapter on fundamental provisions continues

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5704-456: The new Constitution, the Parliament elects and appoints a new Prime Minister and the President appoints the other ministers on the advice of the Prime Minister; under the old system, appointing the entire cabinet was a power vested in the President. While the decision to dissolve the Parliament and call an unscheduled election is still made by the President as head of state, the President may no longer do so at their own discretion but instead only on

5796-453: The original pronunciation, still reflected in e.g. Karelian /čč   : č/ ( meččä : mečän ). In the spoken language, a fusion of Western /tt   : tt/ ( mettä : mettän ) and Eastern /ht   : t/ ( mehtä : metän ) has resulted in /tt   : t/ ( mettä : metän ). Neither of these forms are identifiable as, or originate from, a specific dialect. The orthography of informal language follows that of

5888-596: The other hand, is the main variety of Finnish used in popular TV and radio shows and at workplaces, and may be preferred to a dialect in personal communication. 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. The Dictionary of Contemporary Finnish ( Nykysuomen sanakirja 1951–61), with 201,000 entries,

5980-441: The people as a sovereign—and had clear 17th- and 18th-century intellectual roots in English history. In the 1850s, in the run-up to the Civil War, Northern Democrats led by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois promoted popular sovereignty as a middle position on the slavery issue. It said that actual residents of territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed in

6072-407: The people, and the people should elect, correct, and, if necessary, depose its political leaders. Popular sovereignty in its modern sense is an idea that dates to the social contract school represented by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau authored a book titled The Social Contract , a prominent political work that highlighted

6164-447: The phoneme / k / . Likewise, he alternated between dh and d to represent the allophonic [ ð ] (like th in English this ), between dh and z to represent / θː / (like th in thin , but longer in duration), and between gh and g to represent the allophonic [ ɣ ] . Agricola did not consistently represent vowel length in his orthography. Others revised Agricola's work later, striving for

6256-522: The population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish . In Sweden , both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish ) are official minority languages . Kven , which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by

6348-587: The previous three readings to two. Parliamentary supervision of the Government and of the overall administrative machinery of government is to be enhanced by transferring the National Audit Office, which monitors management of the public finances and compliance with the Government budget, from its previous position under the Ministry of Finance to become an independent office working in conjunction with Parliament. A new Procedure of Parliament, which supplements

6440-520: The provisions in the Constitution Act and the Parliament Act relating to State finances. The extensive reform of Basic Rights in Chapter II of the Constitution Act came into force in August 1995, and the remaining powers of a one third minority to postpone ordinary legislation to the next Parliament were abolished, marking the final transition to majority parliamentarism in respect to ordinary legislation. In

6532-507: The provisions on Parliament contained in the Constitution, came into force at the same time as the new Constitution on 1 March 2000. The main changes in the new Constitution relate to the constitutional regulation of decision-making by the President of the Republic and the formation of the Government. Regulation of presidential decision-making procedures are specified more precisely, while the Government, responsible to Parliament and dependent on

6624-714: The region in the 18th and 19th centuries. Kven is an official minority language in Norway. The Eastern dialects consist of the widespread Savonian dialects ( savolaismurteet ) spoken in Savo and nearby areas, and the South-Eastern dialects now spoken only in Finnish South Karelia . The South Karelian dialects ( eteläkarjalaismurteet ) were previously also spoken on the Karelian Isthmus and in Ingria . The Karelian Isthmus

6716-419: The right to receive information from authorities which they need to carry out their functions, provided the information concerned is not classed as secret and is not related to the preparation of the Government's budget proposal. The new Constitution rationalizes and tightens up Parliament's legislative procedures in respect of the readings of a bill in plenary session following preparation in committee, reducing

6808-401: The second syllable of the word is short. The result is that some forms in the spoken language are shortened, e.g. tule-n → tuu-n ('I come'), while others remain identical to the standard language hän tulee "he comes", never * hän tuu ). However, the longer forms such as tule can be used in spoken language in other forms as well. The literary language certainly still exerts

6900-399: The sovereignty in the person of King George III , with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Thenceforth, American revolutionaries generally agreed with and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people. This was often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed—the idea of

6992-636: The status of official minority languages, and thus can be considered distinct languages from Finnish. However, since these languages are mutually intelligible , one may alternatively view them as dialects of the same language . No language census exists for Norway, neither for Kven, standard Finnish, or combined. As of 2023, 7,454 first- or second-generation immigrants from Finland were registered as having Norwegian residency, while as of 2021, 235 Finns were registered as foreigners studying at Norwegian higher education. Great Norwegian Encyclopedia estimates Kven speakers at 2,000-8,000. Altogether, this results in

7084-622: The territory. The federal government did not have to make the decision, and by appealing to democracy, Cass and Douglas hoped they could finesse the question of support for or opposition to slavery. Douglas applied popular sovereignty to Kansas in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed Congress in 1854. The Act had two unexpected results. By dropping the Missouri Compromise of 1820 under which said slavery would never be allowed in Kansas, it

7176-459: The travel journal, the words are those of a Finnish bishop whose name is unknown. The erroneous use of gelen (Modern Finnish kielen ) in the accusative case, rather than kieltä in the partitive, and the lack of the conjunction mutta are typical of foreign speakers of Finnish even today. At the time, most priests in Finland spoke Swedish . During the Middle Ages, when Finland

7268-422: The two standard languages being not mutually intelligible. Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with other Uralic languages (such as Hungarian and Sami languages ) in several respects including: Several theories exist as to the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages. The most widely held view is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt around

7360-495: The use of Finnish through parish clerk schools, the use of Swedish in church, and by having Swedish-speaking servants and maids move to Finnish-speaking areas. The first comprehensive writing system for Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola , a Finnish bishop, in the 16th century. He based his writing system on the western dialects . Agricola's ultimate plan was to translate the Bible , but first he had to develop an orthography for

7452-504: The variety of American applications: To speak of popular sovereignty is to place ultimate authority in the people. There are a variety of ways in which sovereignty may be expressed. It may be immediate in the sense that the people make the law themselves, or mediated through representatives who are subject to election and recall; it may be ultimate in the sense that the people have a negative or veto over legislation, or it may be something much less dramatic. In short, popular sovereignty covers

7544-492: The vicinity of the Ural Mountains . Over time, Proto-Uralic split into various daughter languages , which themselves continued to change and diverge, yielding yet more descendants. One of these descendants is the reconstructed Proto-Finnic , from which the Finnic languages developed. Current models assume that three or more Proto-Finnic dialects evolved during the first millennium BCE. These dialects were defined geographically, and were distinguished from one another along

7636-626: The western dialects preferred by Agricola retained their preeminent role, while many originally dialect words from Eastern Finland were introduced to the standard language, thus enriching it considerably. The first novel written in Finnish (and by a Finnish speaker) was Seven Brothers ( Seitsemän veljestä ), published by Aleksis Kivi in 1870. The dialects of Finnish are divided into two distinct groups, Western and Eastern. The dialects are largely mutually intelligible and are distinguished from each other by changes in vowels, diphthongs and rhythm, as well as in preferred grammatical constructions. For

7728-403: The western parts of Lapland are recognizable by retention of old "h" sounds in positions where they have disappeared from other dialects. One form of speech related to Northern dialects, Meänkieli , which is spoken on the Swedish side of the border is recognized in Sweden as its own distinct language, having its own standardized language separate from Finnish. This form of speech developed from

7820-409: The will of the people and rule in its name, which would be congruent with Hobbes's view on the subject. Most modern definitions present democracy as a necessary condition of popular sovereignty. Judge Ivor Jennings called the notion that governments are the creation of the consent of its people "ridiculous", as "the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people". The application of

7912-492: Was a prescriptive dictionary that defined official language. An additional volume for words of foreign origin ( Nykysuomen sivistyssanakirja , 30,000 entries) was published in 1991. An updated dictionary, The New Dictionary of Modern Finnish ( Kielitoimiston sanakirja ) was published in an electronic form in 2004 and in print in 2006. A descriptive grammar (the Large grammar of Finnish , Iso suomen kielioppi , 1,600 pages)

8004-600: Was a major boost for the expansion of slavery. Overnight, outrage united anti-slavery forces across the North into an "anti-Nebraska" movement that soon was institutionalized as the Republican Party , with its firm commitment to stop the expansion of slavery. Also, pro- and anti-slavery elements moved into Kansas with the intention of allowing or banning slavery, which led to a raging state-level civil war, known as " Bleeding Kansas ". Abraham Lincoln targeted popular sovereignty in

8096-515: Was evacuated during World War II and refugees were resettled all over Finland. Most Ingrian Finns were deported to various interior areas of the Soviet Union. Palatalization , a common feature of Uralic languages, had been lost in the Finnic branch, but it has been reacquired by most of these languages, including Eastern Finnish, but not Western Finnish. In Finnish orthography, this is denoted with

8188-506: Was little pressure or need for any amendments to the Constitution Act. However, this did not prevent the Constitution from adapting to the changing needs of the day. The flexibility of the Finnish Constitution is due to the use of "exceptive laws", a distinctive feature of the Finnish system: instead of amending or changing the Constitution, an act may be passed as an ad hoc exception to it. Such an exceptive law does not become part of

8280-545: Was published in 2004. There is also an etymological dictionary, Suomen sanojen alkuperä , published in 1992–2000, and a handbook of contemporary language ( Nykysuomen käsikirja ). Standard Finnish is used in official texts and is the form of language taught in schools. Its spoken form is used in political speech, newscasts, in courts, and in other formal situations. Nearly all publishing and printed works are in standard Finnish. The colloquial language has mostly developed naturally from earlier forms of Finnish, and spread from

8372-543: Was the use of the reflexive suffix -(t)te , used only in the eastern dialects. The birch bark letter 292 from the early 13th century is the first known document in any Finnic language . The first known written example of Finnish itself is found in a German travel journal dating back to c.  1450 : Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho sommen gelen Emÿna daÿda (Modern Finnish: " Minä tahdon kernaasti puhua suomen kielen, [mutta] en minä taida; " English: "I want to speak Finnish, [but] I am not able to"). According to

8464-558: Was under Swedish rule , Finnish was only spoken . At the time, the language of international commerce was Middle Low German , the language of administration Swedish , and religious ceremonies were held in Latin . This meant that Finnish speakers could use their mother tongue only in everyday life. 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. There were even efforts to reduce

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