Finnish

Understand

Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language and hence completely unrelated to most other languages. In particular, Finnish has grammatically nothing at all in common with the Nordic languages, English or Russian. The many old loan words especially from Swedish and other European languages are not necessarily recognisable due to the very different phonology. The use of modern neologisms instead of borrowing is common. However, there may be a less used loan word in addition to the neologism: a polygon may be called polygoni, although the common word is monikulmio (a direct translation from the Greek). The origin of Finnish and its relatives traces back over 5,000 years to nomadic peoples of the Ural mountains in Russia who migrated westward. The details of the migration and the relations between languages are still topics of scientific debate. The closest major modern relative, Estonian, is spoken across the Gulf of Finland (Meänkieli, Kven and Karelian are much smaller). The Sámi languages in Northern Scandinavia, in Lapland and on the Kola Peninsula are also related, as are a host of minority languages in Russia. While Hungarian is not by any means close, Hungary and Finland have a special relationship as Finnish for a long time was the only other Finno-Ugric language that was a main language of a sovereign country. Except for Kven spoken in Northern Norway, Meänkieli in northern Sweden, Karelian, a few other tiny minority languages in Russia, and – arguably – Estonian, Finnish is not close to mutual intelligibility with any of its relatives. Finnish is an agglutinative language, and case endings express what English expresses mostly with prepositions. For instance, junalippu Helsinkiin means "train ticket to Helsinki", while junalippu Helsinki is confusing (but possible to understand when uttered by a non-speaker). Also new words are often formed from the same root by suffixes: kirja (book) is the base for kirjain (letter), kirjasin (font), kirjuri (bookkeeper), kirjoitin (