How come the Finnish language, although spoken in Scandinavian Europe, is not even an Indo-European language?

Question

This question has been on my mind for some time. I notice that the majority of the langauges in Europe, along with English, belong to the "family" of Indo-European languages. However, the Finnish language does not fit in as Indo-European. How so? What language family does it come from?

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Finnish has little in common with the Indo-European languages because it has developed individually without interaction with the Latin world.

It is believed that the Baltic Finnic languages evolved from a proto-Finnic language, from which Sami was separated around 1500-1000 BC. It has been suggested that this proto-Finnic had three dialects: northern, southern and eastern. The Baltic Finnic languages separated around the 1st century, but kept on influencing each other. Therefore, the Eastern Finnish dialects are genetically Eastern proto-Finnic, with many Eastern features, and the Southwestern Finnish dialects have many genuine Estonian influences.

The first written form of Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop in the 16th century. He based his orthography on Swedish, German, and Latin. Later the written form was revised by many other people.

Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family (which also includes Hungarian). Finnish is a synthetic language of the agglutinative type. Some fusion is found in spoken Finnish. It modifies noun and verb forms depending on their role in the sentence.

The features that demonstrate Finnish's affiliation with the Finno-Ugric Languages are:

* Shared morphology, including:

* case suffixes such as genitive -n, partitive -(t)a / -(t)ä (< Finno-Ugric *-ta), essive -na / -nä
* plural markers -t and -i-
* possessive suffixes such as 1st person singular -ni (< Finno-Ugric *-mi), 2nd person singular -si (< Finno-Ugric *-ti).
* various derivational suffixes

* Shared basic vocabulary displaying regular sound correspondences with the other Finno-Ugric languages

Features that distinguish Finnish from Indo-European languages are:

* absence of grammatical gender (also worth noting is that the same Finnish pronoun hän denotes both he and she),
* long words due to the structure of the language,
* numerous grammatical cases,
* preference of postpositions against prepositions
* no equivalent of the verb to have, instead a locative construction is used.

There are various theories about the time and place where Finno-Ugric originated; according to the most recent one, Hungarian and Finnish are divided by 6000 years of separate development.

Some scholars maintain that speakers of a Finno-Ugrian language have been living in the region of current Finland since at least 3000 BC. The theory is that Proto-Finnish was divided into three dialects, southern, northern and eastern; standard Finnish represents the northern variety, Eastern Finnish stems from the eastern dialect. Finnish has heavily borrowed vocabulary from Swedish and the other Germanic languages.

Answer 2

It is believed that the Baltic Finnic languages evolved from a proto-Finnic language, from which Sami was separated around 1500-1000 BC. It has been suggested that this proto-Finnic had three dialects: northern, southern and eastern[3]. The Baltic Finnic languages separated around the 1st century, but kept on influencing each other. Therefore, the Eastern Finnish dialects are genetically Eastern proto-Finnic, with many Eastern features, and the Southwestern Finnish dialects have many genuine Estonian influences.

The first written form of Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop in the 16th century. He based his orthography on Swedish, German, and Latin. Later the written form was revised by many other people.

The Reformation marked the real beginning of writing in Finnish. In the 16th century major literary achievements were composed in Finnish by people like Paavali Juusten, Erik Sorolainen, and Jaakko Finno, as well as Agricola himself. In the 17th century books were written in Finland in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Estonian, German and Swedish. However, the most important books were still written in Latin. Finnish and Swedish were small languages of lesser importance.

Finnish had a larger array of different fricatives, but has lost most of them, leaving /s/ and /h/. Fricative deletion has removed the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/, e.g. parghutin [parɣuttiin] becoming modern paruttiin. The same may also be found debuccalized, e.g. lughun → luvun.

There are some similarities to Japanese in grammar.

Answer 3

it comes from the Baltic Finnic languages, also known as Finnic languages... and are spoken around the baltic sea. the best known of the Finnic languages are Finnish and Estonian.

The FinnoUgric group is itself part of the Uralic language group.