Family in Finnish

Finnish, one of the official languages in Finland, has almost five million native speakers. Almost 93% of the population of Finland speak it, and there are about 323,000 Finnish speakers in Sweden (Sulkala xiv). There are also some Finnish-speaking minorities in the United States, and they are scattered in Michigan and in Minnesota (Collinder 9).

Finnish is known as a member of the Finno-Ugric family, and together with Samoyed languages, spoken in Siberia, it is classified as the Uralic family (Collinder 9). The Uralic family includes Hungarian, with 15 million speakers, Estonian, and Lappish as well as Finnish (Finegan 281), and among these languages, Estonian, spoken around the south of the Gulf of Finland, is most closely related to Finnish while Hungarian is the most distant language from Finnish (Karlsson 10).

Genetically, the Uralic family, which Finnish belongs to, is considered to be ëisolatesí because it does not seem to have genetic relation to other language families in Europe or in Asia (Finegan 280). Some scholars, however, claim the relationship between the Uralic family and the Turkic family, which includes Turkish, with 25 million speakers, and Uzbek, spoken in the former Soviet Union by ten million speakers (Finegan 281). These two language families are sometimes joined together, classified as the Ural-Altaic family (Matthews 392). One of the scholars who supports this hypothesis, Collinder states, "most of the pronominal stems are the same in both families (Collinder 30)," and he gives some examples of the similarities of the morphological traits between the Uralic and the Turkic families.

The Finno-Ugric family is assumed to have developed from the proposed language called Proto-Finnic, and the Proto-Finnic period is considered to have begun in the second century BC. The speakers of the Proto-Finnic are assumed to have lived in the south of the Gulf of Finland, which is present day Estonia. It is assumed that the breaking up of the Proto-Finnic into Finnish and Estonian took place probably in the first century AD, however, what we know as Finnish today was not characterized until the early centuries of this millenium (Hakulinen 1-2).

These days, the term, ëFinnishí is used even to refer to Lappish, one of the minority languages in present day Finland, which had been changed into the Finno-Ugric type of language through the influence by the Proto-Finnic language (Collinder 8), and some Baltic-Finnic languages spoken in the western parts of Russia (Karlsson 10). Although the nationalist movement has been trying to get rid of the words or the grammatical structures borrowed directly from Swedish (Karlsson 11), the present day Finnish has been greatly influenced by Swedish, especially in vocabularies (Sulkala xiv).

Works Cited

Collinder, Bjorn. "An Introduction to the Uralic Languages." (8-9, 31) University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965.

Finegan, Edward. "Language-Its Structure and Use." (280-281) Harcourt Brace College Publishers, Orlando, 1994.

Hakulinen, Lauri. "The Structure of the Finnish Language." (1-2) Indiana University Publications, Bloomington, 1961.

Karlsson, Fred. "Finnish Grammar." (10-11) Werner Soderstorm Osakeyhtio, Helsinki, 1982.

Matthews Peter. "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics." (392) Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 1997.

Sulkala, Helena. "Finnish, Descriptive Grammars." (xiv) Routledge, London and New York, 1992.