Finnish language: overview, structure, history, and usage

Finnish belongs to the family of Finno-Ugric languages. While most languages spoken in Europe belong to the Indo-European language family, the Finno-Ugric languages include only Estonian, Sami and Hungarian, as well as a number of languages spoken in European Russia and Northern Siberia.

The relationship between the various languages belonging to this family can often be demonstrated by the linguistic structure, while the vocabulary sometimes shows few similarities. The original forms of Finnish and Hungarian, for example, have been separated for many millennia, and the relationship is no closer than that of various Indo-European languages such as German and Persian.

The Finno-Ugric languages, together with the small group of Samoyedic languages, form the Uralic language family. Together with Estonian, Ischoric, Karelian, Livonian, Võro, Wepsic and Wotic, Finnish forms the group of Baltic Finnic languages.

Due to the history of the development of the Finnish written language, the Finnish alphabet is identical to that of Swedish. It consists of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, supplemented by the special characters å, ä and ö. In alphabetical sorting, e.g. in dictionaries, the umlauts are placed in the order mentioned at the end of the alphabet, not as in German at a and o. The letter w, which is often freely exchanged with the similar-sounding letter v, especially in older texts, is not usually distinguished from the latter in the sorting. The ü, which occurs in German and Estonian names, for example, is sorted identically to the y.

The letters c, q, w, x, z and å do not occur in Finnish words, but sometimes appear in foreign words, especially the å also in the Swedish names frequently found in Finland. The letters b and f only occur in loan words. Sometimes an S with hatschek (š) is used for the sound [ʃ] in loan words. It can be replaced by sh or simply s (e.g. šakki, shakki or sakki "chess"). Even rarer is the voiced equivalent ž, which occurs in geographical names such as Fidži.

Finnish has an almost entirely phonematic orthography; that is, the assignment of phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters) is unambiguous. Loan words are consistently adapted to the Finnish orthography (e.g. filosofia "philosophy"). The phonetic value of the following letters differs from German:

The few exceptions to the congruence of letter and phonetic value include the letter combinations nk and ng, which are pronounced [ŋk] and [ŋː]. Furthermore, an n preceding a p is consistently pronounced as an m (e.g. in kunpa pronounced kumpa, but also in haen pallon pronounced haem pallon). After certain types of words, a doubling of the initial consonant of the following word or word part occurs in the pronunciation, so after words ending in -e (tervetuloa, pronounced tervettuloa) or after negated verbs (en juo maitoa, pronounced en juom maitoa). If the following word begins with a vowel, a glottal stop [ʔ] replaces the consonant doubling.

In Finnish pronunciation, the difference between long and short sounds plays a central role. This difference is consistently reflected in the spelling, in that long sounds are represented by double letters. This applies to both vowels and consonants (tuli "fire"; tulli "inch"; tuuli "wind"). The long sounds are usually exactly twice as long as the single sound. The quality of the vowels is independent of their quantity. Unlike in German, for example, o is always pronounced [ɔ], regardless of whether it is long or short. The lengthening of the consonants k, p and t occurs in such a way that the respective closure state is maintained for a short time.

In Finnish, the first syllable of a word is always stressed. In addition, from the third syllable onwards, there is a secondary stress on every second syllable, with the last syllable remaining unstressed. The length of the vowels is independent of the stress.