Wikibooks: Finnish/Introduction

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: Canada; Norway; Olen’; Finnmark; karelia*; karelian; Northern Norway; Northern Sweden; Republic of Karelia; Sámi
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Finnish/Introduction

[[^^Contents^^]] Introduction [[Alphabet ]] = Overview = Finnish ( suomi in Finnish) is a language belonging to the Finnic branch of the Finno Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. It is not an Indo European language. Its closest linguistic relatives are the Estonian Karelian and Sámi languages. It is also somewhat distantly related to Hungarian and several minor languages spoken in northern Russia. Altogether about six million people speak Finnish. It is spoken in Finland as an official language as a minority language in Sweden (mainly in Northern Sweden and Stockholm) in the Russian Federation (in the Republic of Karelia and the province of Leningrad) in northern Norway (Finnmark) and in Finnish immigrant communities in the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada. = Language structure = The language is structured mostly in the fashion of Subject Verb Object (SVO) like in English but it also might go Object Subject Verb Verb Subject Object or Object Verb Subject as the word order is very flexible in Finnish. However its little quirks like the fashion of the prepositions (in Finnish they are actually postpositions) vowel harmony and the absence of articles and sometimes pronouns make it seem like a mishmash of consonants and vowels. For example the phrase “I am in the car” changes to “(I) am car in” “olen autossa” . = Differences between spoken and written Finnish = There is a significant difference between formal written Finnish and colloquial spoken Finnish. Most Finns especially the younger generation speak the language in an informal way and while the differences between colloquial Finnish and formal Finnish aren t enormous it can be difficult to develop a natural conversational style purely based on literary study. In practice you will be understood without difficulty but one should not expect the conversation of native speakers to match the precise grammatical fashion in which the language is taught. See also the . = Borrowed words = Finnish like most languages has borrowed ...