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77-556: Rovaniemi Airport ( Finnish : Rovaniemen lentoasema ) ( IATA : RVN , ICAO : EFRO ) is the second busiest airport in Finland after Helsinki-Vantaa , as measured by the number of passengers and landings. It is located in Rovaniemi , Finland , about 10 kilometres (6 mi) north of Rovaniemi city centre. The Arctic Circle crosses the runway closer to its northern end. The airport was built in 1940 with two grass-surfaced runways . During

154-803: 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

231-599: 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

308-400: A clause, though it does involve agglutination of roots when forming calques . Ithkuil , on the other hand, contains both agglutination in its addition of affixes and extreme fusion in that these affixes often result from the fusion of numerous morphemes via ablaut . While the above scheme of analytic, fusional, and agglutinative languages dominated linguistics for many years—at least since

385-468: 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

462-597: A few hundred, combine as in polysynthetic languages. Benjamin Whorf categorized Nahuatl and Blackfoot as oligosynthetic, but most linguists disagree with this classification and instead label them polysynthetic or simply agglutinative. No known languages are widely accepted as oligosynthetic. Constructed languages (conlangs) take a variety of morphological alignments. Despite the Indo-European family's typical fusional alignment, most universal auxiliary languages based on

539-508: 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

616-405: 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

693-591: A minimal degree in such languages. There is little to no morphological change in words: they tend to be uninflected. Grammatical categories are indicated by word order (for example, inversion of verb and subject for interrogative sentences) or by bringing in additional words (for example, a word for "some" or "many" instead of a plural inflection like English -s ). Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are expressed by other words. Finally, in analytic languages context and syntax are more important than morphology . Analytic languages include some of

770-468: 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

847-480: A new marker may come in place to substitute the loss of meaning of the previous marker. The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) sees the categorization of languages as strictly analytic, agglutinative, or fusional as misleading, arguing that these categories conflate multiple variables. WALS lists these variables as: These categories allow to capture non-traditional distributions of typological traits. For example, high exponence for nouns (e.g., case + number)

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924-445: 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

1001-546: 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

1078-455: A third category for classifying languages, a category that he labeled polysynthetic . (The term polysynthesis was first used in linguistics by Peter Stephen DuPonceau who borrowed it from chemistry.) These languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio, a highly regular morphology, and a tendency for verb forms to include morphemes that refer to several arguments besides the subject ( polypersonalism ). Another feature of polysynthetic languages

1155-440: 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

1232-486: Is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of 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,

1309-503: 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

1386-400: Is commonly expressed as "the ability to form words that are equivalent to whole sentences in other languages". The distinction between synthetic languages and polysynthetic languages is therefore relative: the place of one language largely depends on its relation to other languages displaying similar characteristics on the same scale. Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic; indeed, most of

1463-726: Is less important for these languages than it is for analytic languages, since individual words express the grammatical relations that would otherwise be indicated by syntax. In addition, there tends to be a high degree of concordance (agreement, or cross-reference between different parts of the sentence). Therefore, morphology in synthetic languages is more important than syntax. Most Indo-European languages are moderately synthetic. There are two subtypes of synthesis, according to whether morphemes are clearly differentiable or not. These subtypes are agglutinative and fusional (or inflectional or flectional in older terminology). Morphemes in fusional languages are not readily distinguishable from

1540-641: 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

1617-727: 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

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1694-624: Is spoken in the Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by 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

1771-580: Is the isolating language , one in which there is only one, or on average close to one, morpheme per word. Not all analytic languages are isolating; for example, Chinese and English possess many compound words , but contain few inflections for them. Synthetic languages form words by affixing a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme. The morphemes may be distinguishable from the root, or they may not. They may be fused with it or among themselves (in that multiple pieces of grammatical information may potentially be packed into one morpheme). Word order

1848-799: Is the second-busiest airport in Finland after Helsinki airport. Santa Claus Village and Santa Park are situated within 2–3 kilometres (1.2–1.9 mi). The airport is located approximately 8–9 kilometres (5.0–5.6 mi) away from Rovaniemi City centre, meaning that it is not far away from many restaurants and hotels. The busiest time for the airport is in the Christmas season, when many people go on Santa Flights. The following airlines operate regular scheduled and charter flights at Rovaniemi Airport: [REDACTED] Media related to Rovaniemi Airport at Wikimedia Commons Finnish language Finnish ( endonym : suomi [ˈsuo̯mi] or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li] )

1925-507: The Continuation War , it served as an airbase and supply center for German Luftwaffe . In 2017, the airport served about 580,000 passengers . The main season of charter traffic from Great Britain and many other European countries lasts from the end of November until the middle of January annually. Many of these flights (especially from Great Britain) are day trip flights, with daytrippers (mostly families with young children) arriving in

2002-490: The Egyptian language as one that has undergone the entire cycle in three thousand years. Other linguists have proposed similar concepts. For instance, Elly van Gelderen sees the regular patterns of linguistic change as a cycle. In the unidirectional cycles, older features are replaced by newer items. One example is grammaticalization , where a lexical item became a grammatical marker. The markers may further grammaticalize, and

2079-594: 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

2156-663: The Sino-Tibetan family, including Chinese , many languages in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and West Africa, and a few of the Germanic languages . Fusional languages encompass most of the Indo-European family—for example, French , Russian , and Hindi —as well as the Semitic family and a few members of the Uralic family. Most of the world's languages, however, are agglutinative, including

2233-622: The Turkic , Japonic , Dravidian , and Bantu languages and most families in the Americas, Australia, the Caucasus, and non- Slavic Russia. Constructed languages take a variety of morphological alignments. The concept of discrete morphological categories has been criticized. Some linguists argue that most, if not all, languages are in a permanent state of transition, normally from fusional to analytic to agglutinative to fusional again. Others take issue with

2310-521: 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

2387-506: 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

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2464-624: The 1920s—it has fallen out of favor more recently. A common objection has been that most languages display features of all three types, if not in equal measure, some of them contending that a fully fusional language would be completely suppletive . Jennifer Garland of the University of California, Santa Barbara gives Sinhala as an example of a language that demonstrates the flaws in the traditional scheme: she argues that while its affixes, clitics , and postpositions would normally be considered markers of agglutination, they are too closely intertwined to

2541-453: 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

2618-674: 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

2695-524: 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

2772-467: The bound morphemes are affixes, and they may be individually identified. Agglutinative languages tend to have a high number of morphemes per word, and their morphology is usually highly regular, with a notable exception being Georgian , among others. Agglutinative languages include Hungarian , Tamil , Telugu , Kannada , Malayalam , Turkish , Mongolian , Korean , Japanese , Swahili , Zulu and Indonesian . In 1836, Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed

2849-450: 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 ) Morphological typology Analytic, fusional, and agglutinative languages can all be found in many regions of the world. However, each category is dominant in some families and regions and essentially nonexistent in others. Analytic languages encompass

2926-404: 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

3003-531: The definitions of the categories, arguing that they conflate several distinct, if related, variables. The field was first developed by brothers Friedrich von Schlegel and August von Schlegel . Analytic languages show a low ratio of morphemes to words ; in fact, the correspondence is nearly one-to-one. Sentences in analytic languages are composed of independent root morphemes. Grammatical relations between words are expressed by separate words where they might otherwise be expressed by affixes, which are present to

3080-478: 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

3157-445: 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

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3234-556: The family have ended up being agglutinative morphologically because agglutination is more transparent than fusion and thus furthers various goals of the language creators. This pattern began with Volapük , which is strongly agglutinative, and was continued with Esperanto , which tends to be agglutinative as well. Other languages inspired by Esperanto like Ido and Novial also tend to be agglutinative, although some examples like Interlingua might be considered more fusional. Zonal constructed languages such as Interslavic tend to follow

3311-551: 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

3388-446: 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

3465-456: 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

3542-570: The language families they are based on. Fictional languages vary among J. R. R. Tolkien 's languages for the Middle earth universe, for example, Sindarin is fusional while Quenya is agglutinative. Among engineered languages , Toki Pona is completely analytic, as it contains only a limited set of words with no inflections or compounds. Lojban is analytic to the extent that every gismu (basic word, not counting particles) involves pre-determined syntactical roles for every gismu coming after it in

3619-470: 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

3696-415: 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

3773-500: The major East Asian languages , such as Chinese , and Vietnamese . Note that the ideographic writing systems of these languages play a strong role in regimenting linguistic continuity according to an analytic, or isolating, morphology (cf. orthography ). Additionally, English is moderately analytic, and it and Afrikaans can be considered as some of the most analytic of all Indo-European languages. However, they are traditionally analyzed as fusional languages . A related concept

3850-411: 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

3927-538: The morning and going home in the evening on the same day. Russians arrive in January because they celebrate Christmas later. In addition to civil traffic the runway is also used by F-18 fighter interceptors of Lapin lennosto ( Lapland Air Command ). The Rovaniemen vartiolentue (Air unit of the Frontier guard of Lapland) is also located nearby. General aviation operators and private pilot owners are served by

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4004-607: 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

4081-460: The most typically cited examples of fusional languages. However, others have been described. For example, Navajo is sometimes categorized as a fusional language because its complex system of verbal affixes has become condensed and irregular enough that discerning individual morphemes is rarely possible. Some Uralic languages are described as fusional, particularly the Sami languages and Estonian . On

4158-419: 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

4235-453: 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

4312-596: 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,

4389-432: The other hand, not all Indo-European languages are fusional; for example, English and Afrikaans , as well as some North Germanic languages lean more toward the analytic. Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one another in that each morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are easily demarcated; that is,

4466-447: 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

4543-504: The provision of a dedicated fully enclosed and heated hangar with a curved snow-shedding roof located near to the terminal complex. Rovaniemi Airport is one of three airports in Finland that has jet bridges (the other two being Helsinki-Vantaa Airport and Oulu Airport ). The airport is managed by Finavia . It is connected to the Rovaniemi city centre by an airport taxi and there are also multiple bus connections around Lapland, including to major winter sports centers. Rovaniemi Airport

4620-714: 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

4697-407: The root or among themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning may be fused into one affix. Morphemes may also be expressed by internal phonological changes in the root (i.e. morphophonology ), such as consonant gradation and vowel gradation , or by suprasegmental features such as stress or tone , which are of course inseparable from the root. The Indo-European and Semitic languages are

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4774-434: The root, yet classifying the language as primarily fusional, as it usually is, is also unsatisfying. R. M. W. Dixon (1998) theorizes that languages normally evolve in a cycle from fusional to analytic to agglutinative to fusional again. He analogizes this cycle to a clock, placing fusional languages at 12:00, analytic languages at 4:00, and agglutinative languages at 8:00. Dixon suggests that, for example, Old Chinese

4851-401: 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

4928-636: 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

5005-459: 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

5082-422: 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

5159-495: 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

5236-492: 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

5313-626: 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

5390-403: 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

5467-513: The world's polysynthetic languages are native to North America. Inuktitut is one example, for instance the word-phrase: tavvakiqutiqarpiit roughly translates to "Do you have any tobacco for sale?". However, it is a common misconception that polysynthetic morphology is universal among Amerindian languages. Chinook and Shoshone , for instance, are simply agglutinative, as their nouns stand mostly separate from their verbs. Oligosynthetic languages are ones in which very few morphemes, perhaps only

5544-492: 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)

5621-457: Was at about 3:00 (mostly analytic with some fusional elements), while modern varieties are around 5:00 (leaning instead toward agglutination), and also guesses that Proto-Tai-Kadai may have been fusional. On the other hand, he argues that modern Finno-Ugric and Dravidian languages are on the transition from agglutinative to fusional, with the Finno-Ugric family being further along. Dixon cites

5698-515: 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

5775-545: 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

5852-543: 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

5929-558: 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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