History
Finnish language is different from other Scandinavian languages. Like Estonian and Hungarian, the Finnish language is classified as an Uralic language. The origin of Finnish language can be traced back to Proto Uralic languages from around 1500BC. It is known to originate in the Boreal Forest Belt near the Ural Mountains.
Amazing Facts about the Finnish Language
Origin: The Finnish language may have originated in the Ural Mountains, the Finns (who speak the Finnish language) originated from lands that now make up modern Turkey.
Speaker: More than 5 Million people in this world speak Finnish language. Majority of these people live in Finland where as a small minority of Finnish speakers also live in Russia, Brazil, USA, Estonia and other Scandinavian countries.
Dialects: The Finnish language can be classified into two dialect. .i.e. The western dialect and the eastern dialect.
Other Names: The Finnish language is also known as Suomi language.
Official Language: Finnish language is spoken by majority of the people in Finland. It is the official language of the country however it is not the only official language of Finland. It shares the title with the Swedish language. It is also one of the official languages of European Union. The Finnish language is also considered as an official minority language in the neighboring Sweden.
Alphabet: There are 29 letters in the Finnish alphabet.
New Vocabulary: Almost 30% of the modern Finnish language is made up of new vocabulary where as about 70% is based on the indigenous words from early Proto Uralic languages.
Borrowed Words: Finnish Language has borrowed a lot of different words from other languages like English, Greek, Latin, French, Arabic, Slavic, Germanic, Turkic, Baltic and a few others.
Writing Direction: The Finnish Language is written from left to right.
Vowels: The Finnish language has eight vowels.
Future Tense: The Finnish language does not have a future tense.
Gender Neutral Language: The Finnish language is gender neutral. This means that instead of using pronouns like he or she the Finnish language uses the word 'han'.
Written Finnish: A Birch Bark Letter is considered to be one of the oldest pieces of written Finnish language. Historians have tried to interpret the words written in the letter but they haven’t been able to completely interpret it. It is thought to be some sort of a spell.
Finnish Literature: Aleksis Kivi wrote and published the first novel in Finnish language in 1870. His literature is known to be very influential.
Finnish Language and Music: Finnish language is considered as the favorite language of heavy metal bands. This is why Finland has the greatest number of Heavy Metal bands.
Ease Of Learning: For English speakers, it is very hard to learn the Finnish language. It has 15 cases of nouns which make it a very difficult language to learn.
Script: The Finnish language follows the Latin script. It is also known as Finnish Orthography.
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