Finnish Language

The Finnish is the official language of Finland.  The Finnish language belongs to the Fenno-Ugric group of  Uralian languages. Estonia, Hungarian and some other languages also belong to the Uralian family. Finnish is not similar to the languages of their neighbors, the Swedes and Norwegians, and he is far from the Russian language.  The Finnish along with Swedish are the state languages of Finland.

The Europeans consider Finnish language as one of the most difficult ones to learn. Difficulties are caused by a complex structure, lot of cases and a huge number of suffixes. Like any other language Finnish has its peculiarities but rumors about the extraordinary difficulties of the Finnish language are greatly exaggerated. Finnish has four tenses, words are read exactly as written, the stress in Finnish always falls on the first syllable.

Finnish alphabet and the first printed book in Finnish appeared in the 16 th century, but until the 19 th century the official language in the country remained Swedish. In the 19 century, Finland was under the rule of the Russian empire and they tried to make  Russian language a state language of Finland in the early 20 th century. However it was not carried out because of the Russian Revolution that brought to Finland’s independence in 1917.

Finnish is spoken in northern Norway, Sweden, Estonia, the United States and Canada.
With regard to the dialects of the Finnish language, they have traditionally distinguished seven (the last time eight) the western and eastern dialects.

Toward the beginning of our era  three language groups appeared of the Baltic-Finnish dialect which consequently became the bases of the Baltic languages. They were southern, western and eastern groups. From the western and eastern groups, respectively, east-Finnish and West Finnish dialects were formed, and the southern group became the basis for the formation of the Estonian language.

The development of the Finnish literary language was significantly influenced by the great Finnish folklorist and linguist Elias Lenrot (1802-1884), collector of folk tales and songs of Kalevala – Grand Karelian-Finnish epos. Day of Kalevala and Finnish culture is celebrated in Finland on February 28.