Finnish

Where it’s spoken

Finnish is the majority official language of Finland (alongside Swedish), and is also a minority language in Sweden, Norway, Estonia, and Russia. Finnish-American communities concentrate in Minnesota, Michigan, and Massachusetts. The closely related Karelian, Veps, and Ingrian are sometimes treated as Finnish dialects.

What it sounds like

Finnish features vowel harmony, phonemic consonant and vowel length, and an astonishing 15 noun cases used to express what other languages do with prepositions. Stress is always on the first syllable. Finnish phonology is famously clean — there are no consonant clusters at the start of native words and few foreign loans.

How it’s written

Finnish uses the Latin alphabet with ä and ö as separate letters alphabetized after z. Spelling is one of the most consistently phonemic in the world: each letter corresponds to exactly one sound. Double letters represent long sounds (talo “house” vs. tallo “stomp”).

History

Mikael Agricola’s 16th-century Bible translation laid the foundation for written Finnish. The 19th-century National Romantic movement, fueled by Elias Lönnrot’s compilation of the Kalevala folk epic, established Finnish as a literary language and a tool of national identity.