Finnish language

Finnish ( suomi , or suomen kieli [ˈsuomen ˈkieli]) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, a dialect of Finnish, is spoken in Northern Norway.

Finnish is the eponymous member of the Finnic language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence.

Classification

Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages. The Finnic group also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea.

Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with other Uralic languages in several respects including:

Kven language

The Kven language is a Finnic language spoken in northern Norway by the Kven people. For political and historical reasons, it received the status of a minority language in 2005 within the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Linguistically, however, it is seen as a mutually intelligible dialect of the Finnish language, and grouped together with the Peräpohjola dialects such as Meänkieli, spoken in Torne Valley in Sweden.

Contrary to popular belief, the dialects spoken by the Kvens and Kainuu peoples are not closely related. The Kainuu dialect is one of the Savonian dialects that was formed from the 16th century onwards, when immigrants from Savonia started to settle in the northern wastelands.

The Kven language has come to incorporate many Norwegian loanwords, such as tyskäläinen (from the Norwegian word tysk, meaning German) instead of standard Finnish saksalainen. The Kven language also uses some old Finnish words that are no longer used in Finland.

Meänkieli dialects

Meänkieli (lit. "our language") is a group of distinct Finnish dialects spoken in the northernmost part of Sweden along the valley of the Torne River.

Linguistically, Meänkieli consists of two dialect sub-groups (Tornio and Jällivaara dialects) of the Peräpohjola dialects, which belong to the Western dialects of Finnish. For political and historical reasons it has the status of a minority language in Sweden. In Swedish nowadays, the language is usually referred to as Meänkieli also by the authorities; a common, and older, name is tornedalsfinska which literally means "Torne Valley Finnish". Meänkieli refers to Torne Valley Finnish (also spoken on the Finnish side of the Torne River) and the Gällivare dialects which belong to the larger Peräpohjola dialect group (see Dialect chart).

Meänkieli is distinguished from standard Finnish by the absence of modern 19th and 20th Century developments in Finnish. Meänkieli also contains many loanwords from Swedish pertaining to daily life. However, the frequency of loanwords is not exceptionally high when compared to some other Finnish dialects: for example the dialect of Rauma has roughly as many loanwords as Meänkieli. Meänkieli lacks two of the grammatical cases used in standard Finnish - the comitative and the instructive (they are used mostly in literary, official language in Finland). In Finland, Meänkieli is generally seen as a dialect of Northern Finnish. There is also a dialect of Meänkieli spoken around Gällivare which differs even more from standard Finnish.