Finnish

Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire

Finnish Tapani Lehtinen, Auli Hakulinen

Citer ce document / Cite this document : Lehtinen Tapani, Hakulinen Auli. Finnish. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 90, fasc. 3, 2012. Langues et littératures modernes. Moderne taal en letterkunde. pp. 1029-1052; doi : 10.3406/rbph.2012.8273 http://www.persee.fr/doc/rbph_0035-0818_2012_num_90_3_8273 Document généré le 26/05/2016

Finnish Tapani Lehtinen and Auli Hakulinen (1)

1. Identity 1.1. The name The native name of the Finnish language is Suomi. In addition to the language, the name also denotes to the country where Finnish is spoken, Finland. The origin of the name has evoked much discussion. Most probably, the name is a loanword and goes back to Pre-Proto Germanic, an early branch of the Indo-European languages, and represents the same word as Gothic guma, Old English guma, Old High German gomo, etc., all having the meaning ’man, human’. In Latin latin the cognate is homo, denoting to ’man; human’ as well. ’Man’ is known to motivate names of many ethnic groups in the world. The noun Finn and the adjective Finnish, originally used by the neighbours and thereby coming to be internationally used, presumably goes back to an Indo-European noun as well, having had the meaning ’man, male’. 1.2. The family affiliation Finnish belongs to the Finno-ugric branch of the Uralic languages. The closest related languages are Karelian, Veps, Ludic, Ingrian, Votic, Estonian, and Livonian, which together with Finnish constitute the Finnic group of the

(1) Tapani Lehtinen has been professor of Finnish language at the University of Helsinki 1985−2008. He defended his doctoral dissertation on historical verb derivation in Finnic (Itämerensuomen verbien historiallista johto-oppia) in 1979. His later work has dealt with Finnic and Finnish morphosyntax, contact induced morphosyntactic and semantic change in Finnic, early stages of Finnish literary language and Finnish dialects. A major work by him in this area is Kielen vuosituhannet. Suomen kielen kehitys kantauralista varhaissuomeen (2007), a millennial history of the Finnish language. Auli Hakulinen, professor of Finnish language at the University of Helsinki 1982-2006, received her PhD at the University of Turku in 1975 (Suomen kielen generatiivista lauseoppia; Issues in Finnish Generative Syntax). Appr. 100 publications in syntax, text linguistics, women’s studies, and conversation analysis (12 books & book editions); engaged in applying linguistics to teaching of Finnish for comprehensive school 1971–79, gymnasium 1994–2006. Most recent work (with others) Iso suomen kielioppi (2004), a descriptive grammar of contemporary Finnish. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, 90, 2012, p. 1029–1052

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FU languages. More distantly related languages are e.g. Saami, Mordvin and Hungarian. Of the Finnic languages only Finnish and Estonian, spoken in independent republics, have developed to full-scale languages of culture, literature, and administration. The other Finnic languages are mainly used orally, and some of them are threatened by extinction. 1.2.1. Origin The area of present-day Finland has been inhabited since the end of the ice age, but there is no definite agreement about when and from where the ancestors of the speakers of Finnish arrived. Two basic theories exist. According to the first one, the linguistic ancestors of the Finns moved to Finland across the the Gulf of Finland from present-day Estonia at about the beginning of the Christian era or immediately thereafter. Since the 1970’s this view has been regarded as obsolete by most scholars, however. The present, more widely accepted theory has it that the linguistic ancestors of the Finns have been living in Finland at least since the Mesolithic stone age and that the Finnish language has developed here during millennia in contact with its mainly Indo-European neighbours. 1.2.2. Substratum and superstratum (a) Substratum In the beginning of the Christian era most of the area of present-day Finland was inhabited by speakers of early Saami languages. The Finnic tribes lived on the coasts, from where they slowly began to spread to the inner parts of the country. In the course of this fennicization some Saami place names were adopted by the colonists (e.g. Nuuksio near Helsinki, cf. Saami njukca ’swan’). The names of some big inland lakes and water systems (e.g. Päijänne, Saimaa) are of unknown and perhaps of much older origin. In addition, there are some hundreds of words common to all or nearly all Finnic languages but which to date have no attested etymology. These words include jänis ’hare’, kova ’hard’, nousta ’rise, ascend’, saari ’island’, etc. It is not impossible that this part of the Finnic vocabulary contains a number of substrate words from ancient unknown languages. (b) Superstratum Finland has been conquered several times, but during the last 2000 years (i.e. during the separate existence of the Finnish language) no foreign conquest has left a superstratum in Finnish. There are, however, at least three distinctive superstrata in Proto-Finnic, the common ancestor of Finnish and its nearest cognates, which came into being through different vawes of foreign immigration. The arrivals were afterwards assimilated to the local population.

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(1) The superstratum left by the NW dialects of the Indo-European protolanguage, archeologically identified as the invasion of the Battle Axe culture between 3200–2300 BC. Words belonging to this stratum are e.g. kalja ’(weak) beer’, kaski ’swidden’, and lehti ’leaf, blade’. (2) The superstratum left by the Baltic protolanguage (or its [Pre-]ProtoBalto-Slavic predecessor) since ca. 2300–1700 BC (the timing is somewhat uncertain). There are over one hundred old Baltic loanwords in Finnish and its nearest cognates, according to some scholars even considerably more. The loans include e.g. heinä ’hay’, herne ’pea’, hihna ’strap’ härkä ’ox’, kirves ’axe’, paimen ’herd’, ratas ’wheel’, seinä ’wall’, silta ’bridge; floor’, and tuhat ’1 000’. Presumably, the contacts with ancient Baltic languages also had an influence on the phonological and syntactic structure of Proto-Finnic. (3) The superstratum left by the early Germanic languages. In archaeology, these contacts are visible on the coasts of Finland (and of Estonia, but to a lesser degree), where during the Bronze Age (ca. 1700–500 BC) burial cairns on the Scandinavian model were built. The Germanic contacts have made a very strong impact on the development of Proto-Finnic. Many of the phonological changes of the Proto-Finnic period have been triggered by these contacts, and there are several hundreds of Pre-Proto-Germanic and ProtoGermanic loanwords in the Finnic languages. The oldest strata include e.g. ahjo ’forge’, hauta ’grave’, kallio ’rock’, kana ’hen’, kansa ’people, folks’, karja ’cattle’, kaura ’oats’, purje ’sail’. Younger (but still very old, Iron Age) words include e.g. airo ’oar’, aura ’plough’, autio ’empty, deserted’, juusto ’cheese’, kattila ’pot’, nauta ’bovine’, niittää ’cut hay’. Among linguists, Finnish is known for its phonological conservativity, distinctly reflected in some old Germanic loans that maintained rather well their original shape in Finnish but developed quite far from it in modern Germanic languages. Thus, Finnish has e.g. kuningas ’king’, borrowed from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz; in English it is represented as king, in German as König, in Swedish as k(on)ung, etc. 1.3. The distinctive features 1.3.1. Phonology and morphophonology The phonemic system (2) of Finnish consists of 8 vowels (a) and 13–17 consonants (b). The fairly scant paradigm is enriched by the quantity opposition: all phonemes except /h, j, v/ can also occur long, e.g. massa ‘mass’ vs. maassa ‘in the country’; mato ‘worm’ vs. matto ‘carpet’. (a) high mid low

front

i y e ö ä

(2) For more details, see e.g. Karlsson 1999.

back

u o

a

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The use of the vowels is governed by the vowel harmony rule, an old Uralic feature in Finnish. According to this rule, front (ä, ö, y) and back (a, o, u) vowels cannot occur in the same (non-compound) word; i and e are ‘neutral’ and occur with both groups (ilta ‘evening’, isä ‘father’). This means that e.g. many case endings have two allomorphs: maa+ta, pää+tä, tuo+ta, työ+tä. labial

(b)

dental

palato-velar

stops p (b) t d k (g) nasals m n ŋ fricatives (f) s (š) laterals l r semivowels v j

glottal

h

The consonants in brackets only occur in recent loan or slang words, e.g. golf, banaani, šokki, squash; futis ‘football’, gimma ‘girl’ (cf. assimilated loans like pihvi ‘beef’, kitara ‘guitar’). The velar ŋ occurs only geminated, as a weak variant of ŋk: kenkä : kengän [keŋŋän] ‘shoe Nom : Gen’. ‘Weak’ refers to the fact that both single and geminated stops as well as consonant clusters where stops are second components, and the first one is a voiced consonant, are involved in consonant gradation: they have a weak and a strong variant depending on the environment, originally on the stress and the syllable structure. So we get singular / plural pairs like this:

matto lakki kuppi mato aika

mato+t laki+t kupi+t mado+t aja+t

‘carpet’ ‘hat’ ‘cup’ ‘worm’ ‘time’

lamppu lantti arkku kangas varas

lampu+t lanti+t arku+t kankaa+t varkaa+t

‘lamp’ ‘coin’ ‘coffin’ ‘cloth’ ‘thief’

Most of the consonants are dental. They are the only ones that, in indigenous words, can occur word finally. The majority of basic forms of words end in a vowel. In indigenous words, consonant clusters are banned both word initially and finally. The primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. 1.3.2. Morphology and word formation Like all Uralic languages, Finnish is a synthetic language. In Finnish, grammatical elements are usually attached to the stem as suffixes, and as the canonical form of a stem is bisyllabic CVCV, inflecting results in rather long actual word tokens. The equivalent to the English phrase ‘in my family too’ is perhee+ssä+ni+kin (stem+case+Px+Clit). Monosyllables are rare; for the most part, they are pronouns (se ‘it’), particles (ai ‘oh’) and conjunctions (ja ‘and’).

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Finnish has a rich inflectional and derivational morphology; in addition, there are half a dozen clitic suffixes. (3) There are 150–180 derivational suffixes in Finnish; less than 10 % are still productive in forming new coinages. Nouns are inflected for number and case, verbs for person, tense and mood; in addition, there are a several infinitival and participial verb forms. Neither nouns nor pronouns have a category of gender: hän means both ‘she’ and ‘he’. The system of 15 case endings can be divided to grammatical, local and marginal cases. Of the 15 nominal cases, the three grammatical cases Nominative, Genitive and Partitive, cover ca. 65–70% of the uses of nouns in running texts. The local cases form a two-dimensional system, which encompasses direction as well as the nature of connection or belongingness: ‘in’

inessive

‘from’

elative

‘to’

illative

‘at; on’

adessive

‘from’

‘to’ Finland

ablative allative

Suome+ssa Suome+sta Suome+en Suome+lla Suome+lta Suome+lle Naturally, the cases are polysemic and put to a variety of syntactic uses (cf. 1.3.3.). There are six persons in the paradigm of verb inflection, and in addition, two subjectless verb forms, the passive and the zero person (cf. 1.3.3.). There are two morphological tenses (present and past) and two periphrastic ones (present perfect and past perfect); the moods are Indicative, Subjunctive, Potential and Imperative. The order of the different elements in the finite verb form corresponding to English ‘should I tell’ is as follows: kerto+isi+n+ko (stem+mood+person+Q), and to ‘have you-pl told’ ole+tte+ko kerto+nee+t. Tense and mood are mutually exclusive so that the subjunctive and the potential mood only have present and present perfect tense; the 4-way tense system is used to the full extent in the indicative mood only. 1.3.3. Syntax A striking morphosyntactic feature of Finnish is the multiplicity of agreement. First of all, there is agreement or indexing between the subject NP and the finite verb for person and number: Minä tule+n ‘I come’, Me tule+mme ‘We come’; Vieras tulee ‘(The) guest is arriving’, Vieraa+t tule+vat ‘(The) guests are arriving’. (4) A similar kind of indexing prevails between a genitive pronominal modifier and its head, marked with a Px: minu+n koira+ni (I-gen dog-Pxsg1) ‘my dog’. Secondly, there is concord between a modifier and the head noun for both number and case: tä+ssä paha+ssa paika+ssa (this-ine bad-ine place-ine) ‘in this difficult situation’, näi+ssä paho+i+ssa paiko+i+ssa ‘in these difficult situations’. The predicative complement agrees with the subject in number: Olo+t o+vat mukava+t ‘the conditions are comfortable’.

(3) According to Karlsson (http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/), a noun can have as many as 2253 forms. (4) There is no definite article in (standard) Finnish.

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As a former SOV language, Finnish still predominantly uses preposed adjective modifiers as well as postpositions: Suure+n puu+n alla lit. ‘biggen tree+gen under’. Word order is relatively free from grammatical uses, Finnish not being a configurational language (5). Typologically, the nature and behaviour of the subject is perhaps the most dominating syntactic feature of Finnish. Subject is not an obligatory constituent: it can be incorporated in the verb as in Ole+n suomalainen ‘I am a Finn’, or it can follow the verb for a number of reasons, e.g. as an emphatic or affective expression: On+pa hän kaunis! ‘Isn’t (is+clit) she beautiful’. A less prototypical subject is the sentence final subject in the Partitive case form in Existential sentences: Suka+ssa on reik+i+ä (sock-ine is holes+par) ‘there are holes in the sock’ or Minu+lla on nälkä. (I-ade is hunger) ‘I am hungry’. There are certain constructions, typically those with a modal verb expressing necessity, that take a Genitive subject: Minu+n täytyy mennä ‘I must go’, and certain sentence types are subjectless: Sataa (V) ‘It is raining’, On kylmä (V + N) ‘It is cold’. Verb initial word order is thus not restricted to interrogatives and imperatives as in many Indo-European languages, but is employed in declarative sentences as well. Moreover, the Finnish Passive, which can be formed of intransitive verbs as well, has no overt subject but it is inherently human: the Agent is implicit in the suffix: Siellä nuku+tt+i+in (stem+pas+tense+pas), lit. ‘There was being slept’. A subjectless 3rd person SG, called zero person, corresponds to the English generic ‘one’ or ‘you’: Täällä Ø ikävysty+y ‘Here one gets bored’. 2. History Finland was made part of the Swedish kingdom in the 12th century. In the 13th century parts of the western and southern coasts were settled by Swedish colonists, and in these regions Swedish is still spoken. In the rest of the country the population remained Finnish. In inland there were speakers of Saami at least until the 17th century. In the north, the Saami languages have been preserved up to the present. In 1809 Finland was conquered by the Russian Empire and incorporated into Russia as an autonomous Grand Duchy. Although the political ties with Sweden were cut off, cultural ties prevailed much longer. Finland obtained her independence from Russia in 1917. 2.1. The emergence The separate development of Finnish began approximately at the beginning of the Christian era, when the Finnic dialects spoken in present-day Finland started to differentiate from the Proto-Finnic.

(5) For an analysis of the functions of word order, see Vilkuna 1989.

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The first occurrence of the indigenous name for Finland, Suomi, has been found in the Frankish annales of the year 811; it is there used as a personal name. Next time the name is found in Baltic and Russian chronicles describing events of the 13th century. The ethnonym Finn is first mentioned by the Roman historian Tacitus in 98 AD (in the form Fenni) and somewhat later by the Greek astronomer Klaudios Ptolemaios (in the form Phinnoi). In the 9th century the name (Finnas) is mentioned in the addenda of King Alfred of England to the World History by Paulus Orosius as well. 2.2. Periodization The history of Finnish has been periodized as follows: (1) Early Finnish extending from the dissolution of Proto-Finnic in the beginning of the Christian Era until the beginning of the Finnish literary language in the first half of the 16th century; (2) Old Finnish from the end of the Early Finnish period until the 1810s, comprising of the later centuries of the Swedish rule; (3) Early Modern Finnish from the 1820s until the 1870s, comprising of a time of profound reforms of the written language; (4) Modern Finnish from 1870s up to the present. 2.2.1. Early Finnish The first occasional Finnish words and names appear in documents written in other languages during the 13th century and during the next two centuries their number goes up to thousands. The way they are written shows that no firm tradition of orthography existed. The earliest preserved text (comprising of one sentence) goes back to the 1470s and is written in medieval German orthography. 2.2.2. Old Finnish (1540–1820) The use of Finnish in literary form was begun in the 1540s. It was connected with the Lutheran reformation and primarily aimed at producing the translation of the Bible and other texts necessary in the religious worship. In Finland the undertaking was entered upon by Michael Agricola (ca. 1510–1557), a peasant’s son from the south coast of the country and later bishop, also called the father of the Finnish literary language. The total mass of Finnish texts produced by Agricola amounts to ca. 2400 pages. They are predominantly translations, but there are also important original texts, especially prefaces to the translations. The largest books by Agricola are Rucouskiria Bibliasta (Prayer book from the Bible, 1544) and Se Wsi Testamenti (The New Testament, 1548). In his writings Agricola used the vernacular spoken around the then capital of Finland, the city of Turku, located in the SW corner of the country.

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This variant was used later as well, up to the end of the Old Finnish period in the first decades of the 19th century. The most important milestone of the Old Finnish period after Agricola was the translation of the entire Bible, which appeared in 1642. The language used in it determined greatly the way the Finnish literary language would look like during the next 170–180 years and even beyond. The initial stages of published poetry (6) go back to the 16th century. In the course of the 18th century also profane prose came into being. It was mainly comprised of enlightening articles on history, agriculture, animal husbandry, hygiene, natural phenomena etc., printed in almanacs and sometimes as separate booklets. The first newspaper in Finnish, Suomenkieliset Tieto-Sanomat (Fi. News) began to appear in 1775, but due to the scarcity of subscribers it ceased to appear the following year. In the history of the genres of written Finnish it was, however, another milestone. On its pages the first pieces of news in Finnish saw the daylight. (a) Linguistic features From the perspective of the present-day literary language, the oldest written Finnish had several archaic features in phonology, morphology and syntax. In phonology, e.g. the voiced dental and palato-velar spirants /δ/ and /γ/, no longer in the phonemic system today, were preserved in many positions. The system also had the voiceless dental spirant /υ/, which later gave rise to the consonant cluster /t.s/ in Modern Finnish. To a great extent peculiarities of Old Finnish were, however, based on the SW dialects. So, for instance, the ending of the Inessive case was sa/sä (josa ’where’, kädesä ’in hand’; at present ssa/ssä), and the stops were in the weak grade in front of a diphthong in i even in open syllables (cullainen /kullainen/ ’golden’, annoi /annoi/ ’gave’; at present the corresponding forms are kultainen, antoi). Old Finnish syntax was infiltrated with constructions adopted from Swedish. There were e.g. passive sentences with an explicit agent in the Ablative case corresponding to the Swedish prepositional equivalent, as well as definite and indefinite articles expressed by the demonstrative pronoun se (Pl. ne) ’that’ and the numeral yksi ’one’. However, efforts to replace such constructions with indigenous ones appeared rather early. (b) Orthography The orthography of Old Finnish did not follow the (present day) iconic principle of writing one phoneme with one (and the same) letter. Thus, Agricola wrote e.g. the phoneme /k/ at least in ten different ways (k, ki, c, ck, ch, q, q, gh, kh), and most letters could be read in several ways. The greatest and most long-lasting shortcoming of the Old Finnish orthography was, however, that the phonematic opposition of quantity, so essential in Finnish, was not systematically marked. This applies both to consonants and to vowels. As a consequence of this and other irregularities e.g. Agricola’s käten could be

(6) Traditional oral poetry dates back several thousand years.

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read in at least six ways: /käten/, /käteen/, /kääten/, /käätään/, /ketään/, and /kätten/, each reading having a different meaning. The orthography gained much regularity in the Bible of 1642, but the present clarity was not achieved until in the second half of the 19th century. (c) The position of Finnish during the Old Finnish period Until the middle of the 17th century the position of Finnish was more or less equal to that of Swedish. However, during the 17th century the relations of the Swedish kings to Finland and the Finnish language slowly began to change. During the 18th century the domain of Finnish continued to be narrowed down and was finally restricted to the domestic use of uneducated common people. By the end of the century all gentry and most of the bourgeoisie were Swedish speaking. However, an important prerequisite for the future of the Finnish language and literature was the effort of the Lutheran Church to make all citizens literate, whether Swedish or Finnish speaking. 2.2.3. Early Modern Finnish (1820–1870) (a) Preconditions In 1809 Russia, after a war with Sweden in 1808–1809, conquered Finland and incorporated it into the Empire as autonomous Grand Duchy, the czar being the Grand Duke of Finland. However, the legislation originating in the Swedish rule was retained, and so was the Lutheran religion. Thus, the internal order of the country was maintained to a large extent and so was the linguistic relationship between the two languages as well. Except for towards the end of the period of the autonomy, Russian was only used in the office of the Governor General. In the new circumstances, hopes for strengthening the position of the Finnish language and culture arose. These strivings were periodically supported by Russians, since promoting the interests of the Finns would loosen old loyalties to Sweden. The connection between language and national culture was emphasized in particular by J. W. Snellman, a philosopher, political theorist, journalist and finally senator. A prominent role in the Finnish cultural movement was taken by Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura (Fi. Literature Society), founded in 1831 by some activists in the University of Helsinki to promote and propagate research into Finnish language and folklore. Among other things, the society gave economincal support to its first secretary Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), who made several extensive journeys to the eastern parts of the country and even to Karelia (mainly on foot), collecting folk poetry. Out of this material Lönnrot composed Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, first printed in 1835. The publishing of Kalevala had an immense effect on the self-esteem of the Finns. (b) Battle of Dialects Efforts to purify the language from foreign influences were begun. The first war cry was uttered in 1820 by Reinhold von Becker, professor of history at the University of Turku. According to him, Finnish should be reformed in accordance to the vernacular of the inner and eastern parts of

1038


the country, where the language was, as he put it, more perfect, since the population did not have as much contact with speakers of foreign languages as in the coastal regions. The initiative taken by von Becker started a linguistic revolution called The Battle of Dialects. On one side there were the reformists who wanted to base the literary Finnish on the eastern dialects, which until then had found almost no footing in literature. On the other side there were the conservatives, who wanted to maintain the western foundation of the literary language. The debate continued for more than thirty years. In the 1850s the battle was ended in a compromise: the foundation of the literary language remained western, but many eastern features, mainly morphological and syntactic, and much eastern vocabulary, were incorporated. The compromise was reached largely due to the authority of Lönnrot. During the The Battle of Dialects, standard Finnish acquired all the essential structural properties it has today. The Old Finnish peculiarities, some of which were mentioned in chapter 2.2.3, had largely been omitted, and the orthography had reached the present phonemic transparency. Times of major fluctuations were over, and it was now possible to develop the language more calmly and systematically than before. (c) Developing vocabulary However, the language that took shape as a result of the Battle of dialects was not perfect. There was still a long way to a vocabulary that could express all the varying aspects of the increasingly versatile society. Words of foreign origin were available, of course, but they were often inconvenient due to their phonological shape. Thus, neologisms were created mainly with domestic resources, screening words of the dialects and exploiting indigenous word-formation. In these decades, new words were proposed by almost anyone who was writing in Finnish. 2.2.4. Modern Finnish 1870– During the last decades of the 19th century, Finnish developed into a language of culture, capable of meeting all the demands that an industrializing, educationally and socially advancing society would posit. Creating new words and standardizing the language continued. The domain of the use of Finnish expanded rapidly. Of particular importance was the development in the following fields. (1) School. Finnish had been a subject of instruction in the elementary schools for boys since 1841, but Finnish secondary schools preparing students for the university were not created until in the 1850s. Schools using Finnish as the language of instruction outnumbered those using Swedish in the 1890’s. (2) Fiction. Finnish fiction had been published in small numbers since the first decades of the 19th century; plays in particular were popular. A milestone in the Finnish dramatic literature was Nummisuutarit (The Shoemakers, 1865) by Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872). It is a comedy that still today belongs to the most popular plays in Finland. Correspondingly, the icon of the Finnish

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prose is Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers, 1870), a tale of seven orphan brothers, their escape to wilderness and return to civilization. The language used by Kivi much resembles the vernacular spoken in Southern Finland, and it is undoubtedly one of the charms of his work. Much more polished was the language of the somewhat later writers who had gone to a Finnish school (which Kivi hadn’t done). A central role in the Finnish cultural history is played by the novel Rautatie (Railway, 1884) by Juhani Aho (1861–1921), a story of how trains first came to the backwoods of Eastern Finland and of the experiences of a poor farmer couple with this new technological achievement. Rather modern was also the language of Minna Canth (1844–1897), the first female novelist and playwright writing in Finnish, and Teuvo Pakkala (1862–1925), an early urban realist. (3) Theatre. The first institutional Finnish theatre was established in 1872. It is illustrative of the time that, for the first few weeks, the theatre worked at Pori, a small town on the west coast, fleeing from the linguistic disputes in Helsinki. There had been some theatre performances in Finnish even earlier, however. Great attention was attracted by e.g. Aleksis Kivi’s biblical play Lea (1869). (4) Press. An important position in the development of the Finnish literary language was occupied by journals and magazines. The first Finnish journal was, as mentioned earlier, Suomenkieliset Tieto-sanomat in 1775–1776. In 1820 the second weekly, Turun Wiikko-Sanomat (Weekly News of Turku), was launched, followed by others in 1829, 1836 and 1845. None of them turned out to be long-lived, however. More important than any of the newspapers mentioned was the weekly Suometar, which began to appear in Helsinki in 1847. It was versatile, comprehensible and purposefully aimed at the improvement of the position of Finnish. The successor of Suometar, the daily Uusi Suomi (New Finland), was published until 1991. The forerunner of Helsingin Sanomat (News of Helsinki), the biggest Finnish daily at present, was Päivälehti (Daily), founded in 1889. 3. Geography 3.1. Expansion In the 12th century, in the beginning of the historical era, there were four regions of permanent settlement in Finland descending from the Iron Age: (1) the narrow coastal strip of SW Finland, (2) the Häme region extending from the lower course of the Kokemäenjoki river to the lake district of middle and southern Häme, (3) the small region near the present town Mikkeli, the core area of the later Savo, and (4) the western and northern coasts of Lake Ladoga. All these areas served as sources of the later colonization of the country. The first Finnish settlement of the north, in particular the NE and N coasts of the Gulf of Bothnia and the Far North, came from SW Finland, Häme and Karelia. The different sources of the settelement can still be recognized in the northern dialects. The colonization of the eastern and inner parts of

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Finland had its source in the present Southern Savo (district of Mikkeli). The settlement, seeking for fresh forests for burnt-over cultivation in the east, crossed the border between Sweden and Novgorod in the 15th century. Another direction was taken some decades later, when the settlement spread over vast areas of inland to the north and north-west. This latter vawe of migration lasted only a few decades, but in its course a larger area was colonized than during all the Middle Ages. In the 1570s the migration even reached Sweden (see chapter 3.1.2.). The present day North Karelia was colonized by Finns from the direction of Savo after 1617, when Sweden took the district from Russia and many of the original Greek Orthodox inhabitants fled to Russia. A similar process took place in Ingria, which was under Swedish rule for most part of the 17th century. North Karelia remained Finnish, but Ingria was reconquered by Russia in 1721. 3.1.1. Data from census At the end of 2010, Finland had 5 363 624 inhabitants, 5 195 722 of them Finnish citizens. The official languages of the country are Finnish and Swedish. At the end of the year 2010 there were 4 857 903 persons with Finnish as their mother tongue (90,4 %) and 291 153 with Swedish (5,4 %). (As for the other languages used, cf. 3.2.1.) According to the law everybody has the right to use Finnish or Swedish in court and in administration as well as to receive documents in these languages. The authorities are responsible for attending to the cultural and social needs of the citizens in both languages according to equal principles. The details are in the Language Law given in 2003, substituting the law from 1922. In the autonomous district of Ahvenanmaa (Sw. Åland) the only official language is Swedish. 3.1.2. Outside of the present borders of Finland There are several groups of Finnish minorities in the neighbouring countries and overseas (7): (a) Sweden (1) Finns of medieval origin. Finland became a part of Sweden in the 12th century, and many Finns sought their way early on to the cultural and administrative centers of the country. They lived mostly in Stockholm and its vicinity, and since 1533 there has been a Finnish congregation in the capital of Sweden. It has been estimated that at the end of the 15th century about 10–20 % of the inhabitants of Stockholm, ca. 5 000 in total, were Finns. (7) An up-to-date treatment of the Finnish minorities abroad is Jönsson-Korhola et al. 2003.

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(2) Forest-Finns of Middle Scandinavia. A new period of the history of Finns in Sweden began in the 1570s when Finnish peasants, practising swidden cultivation, were persuaded to move to Sweden in order to settle down in the large forests there. Some of them moved further west, to Norway. In this way the large and solid settlement of the “Forest Finns” of MiddleScandinavia came into being. It remained alive until the first half of the 20th century; the last speakers of Finnish died in the 1960s. (3) The speakers of Meän kieli. The Finnish-speaking population living on the Swedish side of the river Tornionjoki, flowing on the border between Sweden and Finland in the north, is historically part of the same population that lives on the Finnish side. The traditional vernacular of the Finns on the Swedish side used to belong to the North-Ostrobothnian dialects of Finnish. However, the language area was split when the border between Sweden and Finland, the newly conquered Russian Grand Duchy, was drawn along the river in 1809. Since then the linguistic development on the Swedish side has been somewhat different from that on the Finnish side, the main distinction being that Meän kieli (lit. ’our language’), as the language is being called in Sweden today, has been much more influenced by Swedish than the vernacular on the Finnish side. The lexical differences are greater than the structural ones. It is estimated that there are ca. 35 000–65 000 speakers of Meän kieli in Sweden. In 2000 Meän kieli was granted the status of an official minority language, and efforts are made to its standardization and codification. (4) Swedish Finns. In addition to the speakers of Meän kieli, there are some 300 000 Finns living in Sweden, having moved there since the end of the second world war. Most of them speak Finnish, but a relatively large part of the migrants are Swedish-speaking Finns (in 1990 ca. 65 000). The migration was particularly lively in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was large-scale restructuration of industries and, as a consequence, heavy unemployment in Finland. (b) Norway The most significant of the Finnish-based minorities in Norway are the Kveenis of the northern coasts of Norway. According to our present knowledge Kveenis, people of Finnish origin, have lived on the Norwegian coast at least since the 16th century, but there has been later immigration as well, during the 18th and 19th centuries in particular. Since 2000, the Kveeni population has had the status of an official minority in Norway. Finns who moved to the region later, especially after the second world war, are not called Kveenis but Finns. The name Kveeni is of ancient Germanic origin and occurs already in the 9th century. Today, there are approximately 10 000 Kveenis in Norway, 5 000–7 000 of whom know the language, more or less. (c) Russia In Russia, at least nine Finnish migrant groups can be distinguished during historical times. Of these, only two most important ones will be mentioned here; the rest have vanished or are in the verge of vanishing through assimilation with the Russians and other minority groups.

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(1) Ingrian Finns. The oldest and largest migrant group consists of Ingrian Finns (cf. chapter 3.1.). During the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish cultural life in Ingria was flourishing with schools, churches, newspapers, etc. In the beginning of the 20th century Ingria had a population of about 126 000 Finns. During the 1930s and 1940s the Finns, however, were hit by heavy repression, and they were dispersed as an ethnic group. According to the census, there were little more than 16 000 Ingrian Finns left in 1979. Since the 1990s a large number of Ingrian Finns have migrated to Finland. (2) The Finns of Karelia. A large number of Finns have lived in the Republic of Karelia as well. The republic, established in 1920 and having since then borne various names and ranks in the state structure of the Soviet Union, got its core population and first leaders from Finland after the Finnish civil war had ended in 1918. More Finns arrived during the 1920s and 1930s, legally and illegally, from Finland and North America, but their numbers were heavily reduced by the purges in the late 1930s. After World War II a lot of Ingrian Finns settled in Karelia. In 2000 there were 14 156 Finns in the Karelian Republic, 2,0 % of the whole population. (d) Overseas (1) American Finns. After some preliminaries in the 17th century, immigration from Finland to North America began in the second half of the 19th century. In 1990 the number of Finns and their descendants in the USA totalled 658 870, and in Canada the number was 91 335 (in 1986). These numbers include the first two generations of the immigrants. (2) Australian Finns. Australia has received Finnish immigrants since the late 1800’s, but their number remained low (some hundreds) until the 1950s. In the 1950s and 1960s ca. 10 000 Finns arrived when immigration was supported by the Australian government. After the 1970s migration to Australia has been reduced. (3) Other groups. There are some 18 000–19 000 Finns in Germany. Switzerland has ca. 7000 Finns, and Spain ca. 3100. 3.2. In contact 3.2.1. The languages of the insiders (a) Dialects, regional vernaculars and Standard Colloquial (1) Dialects. Finnish dialects are usually divided into two primary groups, western and eastern dialects. In the middle of the 19th century there was still no standardised spoken Finnish, and those who spoke Finnish used rural dialects. When the Standard Colloquial evolved in the late 19th century (see later in this chapter), it soon began to have a levelling influence upon the dialects. A significant role in this process had the Finnish schools, which came into being in the latter half of the 19th century and which during decades regarded as one of the major responsibilities to root out dialectisms from the speech of the pupils. Newspapers and magazines, radio, TV etc. have contributed to the same effect, as well as the migration into towns caused by post-war rebuilding and industrialisation.

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(2) Regional vernaculars. Although traditional rural dialects have long been living under the levelling pressure of Standard Finnish, they have not entirely vanished. Rather, they have been replaced by regional vernaculars, varieties that have maintained traces of rural dialects but that have lost more specific local dialect features. (3) Standard Colloquial. As mentioned above, in the middle of the 19th century the middle and higher echelons of the Finnish society spoke Swedish. But along with the development of the Finnish press, theater, fiction and school system, more and more educated people changed their language. By the end of the 19th century, dozens if not hundreds of Swedish-speaking families had gone over to Finnish. It has been suggested that the relatively big difference between the standardised, publicly used colloquial Finnish, as we hear it in radio, TV etc., and the more freely spoken varieties is due to the fact that Finnish spoken by educated people originally emerged as a second language, guided by books. (b) Minority languages The second national language of Finland, Swedish, is not regarded as a minority language, although it is spoken as a mother tongue by only 5,4 % of the population. Minority languages recognized by the law are Saami, Romani and Finnish Sign Language. In addition, a number of immigrant languages are spoken. (1) Saami. Three Saami languages are spoken in Finland: North Saami, Skolt Saami and Inari Saami. The homelands of the languages are in the north, Lapland. At the end of 2010 there were 1 832 (0,03 %) Saami speakers in Finland, but when also genealogy and cultural identity are taken into account, Finland has about 7 500 Saami people. Since 1991 the law has allowed Saami to be used in communication with the authorities. In addition, the Saami people of Finland have an autonomy in linguistic and cultural matters in their northern homelands. Most of the speakers of the Saami languages live in the other Scandinavian countries; to a lesser extent there are Saami speakers in Russia as well. In all, there are about 75 000 Saami people in these countries, according to some estimates even 100 000. (2) Romani. Finland has about 10 000 ethnic Romani people; in addition, ca. 3000 Finnish Romanis live in Sweden. Romani has the status of a nonlocal minority language of Finland, and there is legislation against discrimination obliged by the European convention of human rights. (3) The Finnish Sign Language. The Finnish Sign Language is the mother tongue of ca. 4000–5000 deaf people. Their linguistic rights are guaranteed in the constitution. (c) Immigrant languages At the end of 2010 there were 248 135 inhabitants who had other mother tongues than Finnish; 97 338 were born outside of Finland. The largest groups were those speaking Russian (54 559 persons), Estonian (28 493), Somalian (12 985), English (12 855) and Arabic (10 415). There were 167 954 foreign citizens living permanently in Finland in 2010; 3,1 % of the population.

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3.2.2. The languages of the “outsiders” (a) Old strata of loanwords Old loan contacts of Finnish have been described in connection with the superstrata (see chapter 1.2.2.). In addition, there are many loanwords originating in ancient contacts that have occurred far from the present Finnish territory, most probably somewhere in the middle of present-day Russia. Naturally, Finnish as a separate entity did not exist during those times. The loans can be classified as follows: (1) Loans from the Indo-European protolanguage include e.g. kulkea ’go, be in motion’, myydä ’sell’, vesi ’water’, and vetää ’pull’. (2) Loans from the early stages of the Aryan (= Indo-Iranian) languages are e.g. mehi(läinen) ’bee’ (the latter part of the word is of indigenous derivational origin), mesi ’honey’, ora ’thorn’ and sata ’100’. (3) Loans from Proto-Iranian include syntyä ’be born’, maksa ’liver’, paksu ’thick’, and huhta ’swidden’. (b) Swedish loans The most intensive contacts, however, have been with Swedish, which is the source of some thousands of loanwords in Finnish. The great number of loans is no surprise: from the middle ages to the first decade of the 19th century Finland was a part of Sweden, its eastern province, and there has been a considerable Swedish-speaking minority in Finland all through centuries. Semantically the loanwords represent practically all fields of human culture, but of particular interest one may find words reflecting Finland’s (Western) European cultural affinity. For example, the names of weekdays and some important festival days are Swedish loanwords (maanantai ’Monday’, tiistai ’Tuesday’, torstai ’Thursday’ etc.; helluntai ’Whitsun’, joulu ’Christmas’). Further, the loans include nouns denoting trades (kauppa ’trade; shop’), social relations (herra ’mister; Lord’, rouva ’madame’), constructed environment (kaupunki ’town’, katu ’street’), buildings (sali ’hall’, talli ’stable’, torppa ’crofter’s cottage’), secular and ecclesiastical administration (laamanni ’rural police chief’, lukkari ’parish clerk’, kirkkoherra ’vicar’), religion (synti ’sin’, helvetti ’hell’, paasto ’fast’), etc. Via Swedish, Finnish has received a large number of words originating in other languages, e.g. koulu ’school’ from Latin, kirkko ’church’ from Greek, komitea ’committee’ from French, maalata ’to paint’ from German, salaatti ’salad’ from Italian, paraati ’parade’ from Spanish, halli ’hall’ from English, alkoholi ’alcohol’ from Arabic, etc. Swedish has had considerable influence on Finnish dialects, the western ones in particular. (c) Russian/Slavic loans There are ca. 350 Slavic loanwords in Literary Finnish. Interestingly, part of the earliest Christian terminology is of Russian origin (pappi ’priest’, risti ’cross’, pakana ’heathen’ and Raamattu ’Bible’). But there are words belonging to many other fields as well: ikkuna ’window’, lusikka ’spoon’, määrä ’quantity’, raja ’border’, sirppi ’sickle’, toveri ’companion’, vapaa ’free’ etc.

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According to the traditional view, the bulk of the Slavic loan words were received from Old Russian, spoken about 800–1 300 AD, but recently there have been efforts to date the beginning of the Slavic contacts much earlier. Many loanwords from Modern Russian, not known in the literary language, have been adopted to the eastern dialects of Finnish. (d) Saami loanwords There are some dozens of Saami loanwords in Finnish, mostly acquired in the northernmost dialects but some of them taken over to the literary language, e.g. olas ’groove (of the ski)’, mursu ’walrus’, vuono ’fiord’. (e) Loanwords from English A number of more or less recent English loanwords have been taken over, particularly into colloquial Finnish, e.g. friikki ’freak’, netti ’net’, sponsori ’sponsor’, surffata ’to surf’, tiimi ’team’. 4. Auxiliaries 4.1. Institutions and language planning (a) Universities There are eight faculties of arts and humanities in the universities of Finland, and Finnish (as well as Swedish) is a subject in all of them. Saami has a professorship at the University of Oulu, and in addition, there are two professorships in the Finno-ugric languages (Helsinki and Turku) and one in the Finnic languages (Helsinki). (b) Institute of the Languages of Finland Apart from universities, research on Finnish and Swedish is carried on in the Institute of the Languages of Finland, an institution of ca. 70 persons, established (8) in 1976 by the Ministry of Education. The Institute combined several until then separately administrated linguistic enterprises, e.g. dictionary projects and language planning work. In 2011, due to the governement’s “productivity programme”, the name of the Center was changed, its research tasks were considerably reduced, and part of the research personnel was transferred to the universities of Helsinki and Oulu. The Institute is still seminal in language planning: it provides maintenance of Finnish, Finland Swedish, Saami, Romani and Finnish Sign Language. For the planning of Finnish, Kielitoimisto (The Finnish Language Office) is responsible, and the planning of Finland Swedish is the responsibility of Svenska språkbyrån (Swedish Language Office). There are expert boards for all the languages mentioned. For details see http://www.kotus.fi > In English > Language Planning.

(8) Under the name Research Center for the Languages of Finland.

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(c) Scientific societies There are about half a dozen scientific societies that were created for the study and advancement of Finnish. The oldest and perhaps best known of them is Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura (Fi. Literature Society, SKS), established in 1831. Especially in the 19th century the society was a central agent in the Finnish cultural efforts (see 2.2.3.). Since then its activities have included language planning, maintaining and conducting research on the extensive archives of literature and folklore, upholding a research library that specialises in Finnish literature, literary studies and cultural research, and running a publishing house for research in the humanities. Kotikielen Seura (Society for the Study of Fi.) was established as a student organization in 1876 to promote the study and use of Finnish. Since 1897 the society has been publishing the quarterly journal Virittäjä, the oldest and most important linguistic journal published in Finnish. The sister organization of Kotikielen Seura is Suomen kielen seura (Fi. Language Society), established in 1929 in Turku. Since 1959 it has been publishing the year book Sananjalka. Like in Virittäjä, the articles are in Finnish, but a summary is always included in an international language. In 1980, Nykysuomen seura (Society for Modern Fi.) was established in Tampere; it publishes a quarterly Kielikuvia (Linguistic Images), aimed at the general public. 4.2. Linguistic resources 4.2.1. Conventional (a) Dictionaries The first dictionaries containing Finnish were vocabularies predominantly meant for teaching Finnish to Swedish speaking officials (1637, 1678). The most significant dictionary of the Old Finnish period was published in 1745 by bishop Daniel Juslenius, titled Suomalaisen Sana-Lugun Coetus or Fennici Lexici tentamen (Trial of a Fi. D.). It had about 16 000 entries in Finnish, and the words were given an equivalent in Swedish and Latin. The manuscript of the next major dictionary, titled Nytt Finskt Lexicon (The New Fi. D.), was completed in 1787 by Kristfrid Ganander, but it was not printed. A facsimile of the manuscript appeared in 1937–1940 and a type set version in 1997. During the 19th century several dictionaries were published, the most important being Suomalais-Ruotsalainen Sanakirja (Fi.-Swedish D., 1867– 1880) by Elias Lönnrot. It was much larger than any of the previous ones, and it was in common use until the first half of the 20th century. There are about 200 000 entries explained in Swedish. One of the major cultural initiatives of the 19th century was the proposal made in 1896 by professor of Finnish E. N. Setälä, according to which three Finnish dictionaries should be produced: one of Modern Finnish, one of Finnish dialects, and one of Old Literary Finnish. This proposal is known as Setälä’s Dictionary Programme. Of the programme only the dictionary of Modern Finnish has been finished so far, the extensive Nykysuomen sanakirja (D. of Modern Fi., 1951–1960).

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It has about 210 000 entries, mostly vocabulary from the 1880s until the 1930’s but partly even up to the 1950s. There is no complete update of Nykysuomen sanakirja, but this shortcoming is partly compensated by the three-volume Suomen kielen perussanakirja (Basic D. of Fi., 1990–1994) containing vocabulary attested in written Finnish of the recent decades. It has ca. 100 000 entries and is also available as a CD. A new and improved version of the CD-edition was published in 2004, titled Kielitoimiston sanakirja (The D. of the Fi. Language Office). It is available as CD and also as versions for Internet. A new, augmented version of this dictionary was published in 2012, first as an Internet version, and subsequently in printed form. The process of producing the Dictionary of Finnish Dialects has been long and complicated. Preliminary work was initiated in the 19th century, but the first volume of the dictionary, Suomen murteiden sanakirja, was not published until 1985. By 2010, eight volumes have been published, the goal being 20 volumes. In 2011, the publication of the dictionary was discontinued in printed form, and the first one of the electronic volumes appeared in 2012: http://kaino.kotus.fi/sms Preparations for the Dictionary of Old Literary Finnish (Vanhan kirjasuomen sanakirja) were begun in the 1950s, and to date two volumes (out of six) have appeared. The dictionary describes the vocabulary of the Old Finnish period, i.e. until the 1810s. In 2011, also work on this dictionary was discontinued but from 2012 on it was resumed, now sponsored by the Kone foundation. The most up-to-date etymological dictionary of Finnish is Suomen sanojen alkuperä (I–III, completed in 2000). (b) Grammars The first two Finnish grammars preserved to our day were published in the 17th century, but their worth is severely diminished due to the strong influence of Latin grammar on them. The third one, Grammatica Fennica, published by vicar Bartholdus Vhaël in 1733, was more explicitly aiming at describing Finnish on its own terms. In the 19th century, the century of the renewal of the Finnish language, there was a boom of grammatical literature. The first grammar of the century was Finsk Grammatik (Fi. Gr., 1824) by Reinhold von Becker, the initiator of the Battle of Dialects (cf. 2.2.3.) and an advocate of the Eastern Dialects as the basis of the literary language. In 1840 appeared the grammar by Gustaf Renvall, representing the opposite view, titled Finsk Språklära, Enligt den rena Vest-Finska, i Bokspråk vanliga dialecten (Fi. Gr. According to the Pure West-Fi. Dialect Commonly Used in the Literary Language). During the next few decades several significant grammars were published, but the most long-lasting impact was made by the two grammars of E. N. Setälä. Setälä published his Finnish syntax Suomen kielen lause-oppi (1880) as a schoolboy. Another textbook was a treatment of phonology and morphology, Suomen kielioppi. Äänne- ja sanaoppi (Fi. Gr. Phonology and Morphology, 1881). Versions of Setälä’s textbooks were used in schools and universities until the 1970s.

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Of the 20th century grammars, the one by Aarni Penttilä, Suomen kielioppi (Fi. Gr., 1957), is based on extensive material gathered from standardized written language and fiction. In 1964 Paavo Siro published his aphoristic and innovative Suomen kielen lauseoppi (Fi. Syntax), written in part on structuralistic principles. The work by Auli Hakulinen and Fred Karlsson titled Nykysuomen lauseoppia (Syntax of Modern Fi., 1979) was informed by generative grammar but did not apply it in an orthodox manner. In addition of being a description, the work Suomen kielen äänneja muotorakenne (The Phonological and Morphological Structure of Fi.) by Fred Karlsson (1983) also aims at testing some theoretical notions. The internationally best known basic grammar of Finnish is Karlsson 1999, also published in e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean. The most recent Finnish grammar was published in 2004, titled Iso suomen kielioppi (Comprehensive Gr. of Fi.). It has almost 1700 pages and was produced by a group of authors, led by Auli Hakulinen. This is a descriptive grammar in which the everyday spoken language is considered alongside with the literary standard. (c) Archives There is a comprehensive Audio Recordings Archive in the Institute for the Languages of Finland. The archive provides authentic samples of Finnish dialects, modern spoken Finnish and languages related to Finnish. The total amount of the recordings is 24 000 hours. The public online edition of the audio collection database is available in the net (http://kaino.kotus.fi/naark, in Finnish). In the Institute there is also an extensive Lexical Archive of Finnish dialects consisting of ca. 8 000 000 items of data on some 400 000 dialect words. The Names Archive contains collections of Finnish and Saami names, e.g. over 2,6 million toponymic card files itemized by parish. The Morphological archive is part of the Department of Finnish, FinnoUgrian and Scandinavian Studies in the University of Helsinki. The archive consists of ca. 500 000 paper file cards which include systematically collected and grammatically coded dialectal data from 139 local dialects. All of the material has been digitized as pdf-files (pictures of the paper file cards). In addition to this ca. 40 % of the material has also been digitized character per character. These two data sets form a digital database under the name Digital Morphological Archives of Finnish Dialects (DMA), part of the the Language Bank of Finland. – Since the 1980s, the department has acquired a small Archive of conversational Finnish, which was digitized in 2002. It contains 500 hours of conversational Finnish of which ca. 100 hours is transcribed. 4.2.2. Electronic The largest collection of corpora representing Finnish of the 20th century is the one belonging to the Language Bank of Finland, located on the computers of CSC, the Finnish IT center for science. Some of the archives mentioned here have also been deposited to the Bank in electronic form. There are texts representing fiction, non-fiction, dailies and periodicals totalling about 180 million words. To date (summer 2006) users have access to

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13 different parsers and taggers on Finnish, Swedish and English corpora. Cf. www.csc.fi > Services for researchers > Sciences and methods > Language research. The Institute for the Languages of Finland has the most versatile collection of Finnish historical texts in digital form. In addition to corpora of the 20th century Finnish (included in the Language Bank) there are rather extensive corpora representing 19th century Finnish (from ca. 1810 until 1900), Old Finnish (until 1810), and Finnish dialects and toponyms. In all, the corpora of the Institute consist of ca. 205 million words. In the near future also audio-visual corpora including audio and video recordings with transcriptions will be available. The electronic Syntactic archive of the Finnish Department of the University of Turku consists of texts, coded syntactically and morphologically, representing both standard and dialectal Finnish, and of a programme for using the material. In the Finnish Literature Society, a digitizing project concerning traditional folk poetry, previously published in 34 volumes (1908 – 1948, 1997), was completed by the end of 2006, cf. http://www.finlit.fi/skvr/. 4.3. Culture 4.3.1. Books, series and periodicals (a) Books In the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish literature concentrated in describing rural life; authors such as Ilmari Kianto (1874–1970), Joel Lehtonen (1881–1934), Volter Kilpi (1874–1939), Maiju Lassila (1868– 1918), Maria Jotuni (1880–1943) and Johannes Linnankoski (1869–1913) can be mentioned. International fame was gained by Frans Emil Sillanpää (1888–1964), who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1939. The internationally best known Finnish writer of the 20th century was, however, Mika Waltari (1908–1979), who wrote i.a. Sinuhe Egyptiläinen (The Egyptian, 1945) and Johannes Angelos (1952). Sinuhe has been translated into 25 languages and Johannes Angelos into 18. More specifically domestic themes were dealt with by Väinö Linna (1920–1992), whose Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown soldier, 1954) won unprecedented popularity in all echelons of the society. Another major novel by Linna is Täällä Pohjantähden alla 1–3 (Under the Polar Star, 1959–1962). It is an epic describing the vicissitudes of one crofter family from the 1880’s until the 1950’s. Two authors who have recently been much translated into foreign languages are Veijo Meri (1928–) and Arto Paasilinna (1942–). Among eminent poets the names of Paavo Haavikko (1931–2008), winner of the Neustadt Prize in 1984, Bo Carpelan (1926–2011), writing in Swedish, who twice won the Finlandia-prize by the Finnish Book Foundation, and Sirkka Turkka (1939–) whose poetry was awarded Finlandia Prize in 1984, should be mentioned. Pentti Saarikoski (1937–1983), an enfant terrible of Finnish literary life in the 1960’s, is renowned for translating i.a. both Homer’s Odysseus and Joyce’s Ulysses into Finnish.

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In 2010, altogether 4450 new book titles were published in Finnish. The number of new fiction titles was 671; of them, almost half were translations. Books for children outnumbered these: altogether 1071 new books in Finnish for children and young readers were published in 2010. Finnish Literature Society publishes a quarterly Books from Finland with information of current work and translations. (b) Dailies, periodicals. At present, the largest daily newspaper is Helsingin sanomat (circulation in 2010: 383 361 copies; 435 152 on Sundays), second being the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat (Evening News, 143 321 copies, cf. chapter 2.2.4.). The largest daily in Swedish is Hufvudstadsbladet (News of the Capital, 46 395 copies). Altogether 38 dailies (7–4 times weekly) and 57 other newspapers (3–1 times weekly) appeared (data from 2011). In addition, there were 128 periodicals and 7 comics. The total circulation of the dailies is ca. 3 million copies. The circulation of periodicals (appearing at least 4 times a year) is slightly higher 3,5 million copies, and not diminishing at a comparable pace. 4.3.2. Other media: radio, TV, films, popular music There are about ten broadcasting companies with national service, the biggest one being the state-owned YLE (or Yleisradio). YLE operates five national tv channels and seven radio channels complemented by 17 provincial and 4 regional radio channels, and 5 regional channels in Swedish. Three channels send pogrammes in other languages. There is service also in Saami, Romani and the Finnish Sign Language. In addition, there are dozens of smaller, private-owned local radio stations. In the three year period 2009-2012 in average 24 new domestic movie titles have been released each year. The domestic market share has varied between 10 and 22 %. In 2011, domestic films had 1 213 774 spectators. Since the ‘70s and ‘80s, Finnish rock groups began to perform in Finnish, at first with texts translated from English, but later they wrote increasingly in Finnish; the phenomenon ‘Suomi-rock’ was born. Hardcore punk in Finnish was well received abroad from 1982 on. Other genres of popular music perform abroad in Finnish as well. 5. Present and future role of Finnish 5.1. In Finland Finnish reached its full rights as an official language relatively recently, when Finland gained independence in 1917. The position of the national languages of the country, Finnish and Swedish, was defined in the Language Law in 1922 (renovated in 2003). Both Finnish and Swedish are official languages, but speakers of Finnish constitute an overwhelming majority. The fact that there are two official languages in Finland does not threaten Finnish in any way (cf. the numbers illuminating publishing and broadcasting activi-

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ties in 4.3.1. and 4.3.2.). Rather, it is the Swedish spoken in Finland that is at stake. (9) Some endangerment may be seen in the fact that the use of English is gaining ground in science, education and business. There are increasing numbers of courses taught in English at the universities, and almost all the publications in the field of natural sciences are in English. This is obviously a threat to the development of scientific Finnish. Some major companies have gone over to English as the language of business, even when communicating within Finland. Unlike most of our small neighbouring countries, Finland has no up to date official language policy nor any systematic action plan for the preservation of the two national languages against external threats. For this reason, some linguists set up a voluntary group and published a report, Suomen kielen tulevaisuus – kielipoliittinen ohjelma (2009), a programme for language policy with suggestions and recommendations. Based on one of its recommendations, work for a Wiki-based Finnish Bank of Scientific Terminology was begun in 2011, supported by the Academy of Finland. 5.2. In other countries Of the Finnish-based minorities in the neighbouring countries, particularly the speakers of Meän kieli in Sweden and the speakers of Kveeni in Norway are determined to revitalize their language. However, the processes have begun rather recently, and thus it is difficult to see what direction the development will take in the future, despite the support received from the EU. As to the minorities of later origin in Sweden, Norway, USA, Canada, Australia, etc., it seems inevitable that they will be assimilated to the main population in the course of the next few generations. 5.3. In international circles and institutions Finnish is one of the official languages of the EU as well as of the Nordic Council. In 2010, a European network for promoting language technology (META-NET) was established. There are 33 countries and 54 research units involved, and the purpose is to advance multilingual applications of language technology, e.g. information retrieval and extraction, speech recognition, spelling checking and computer-assisted language learning. In the age of digital revolution, the META-NET may ultimately serve to enhance the survival of European languages. For the Finnish e-book, see http://www. meta-net.eu/whitepapers. (10)

(9) A modern treatment of the lingual relations in Finland is McRae 1999. (10) The work for the Finnish part of META-NET is carried out in Computational Cognitive Systems Research Group, Aalto University and Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki.

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6. Bibliographic orientation HÄKKINEN (Kaisa), Agricolasta nykykieleen. Suomen kirjakielen historia. [From Agricola to Modern Fi. The History of Literary Fi.], (Porvoo: WSOY, 1994). HAKULINEN (Auli) & al., Iso suomen kielioppi [Comprehensive Gr. of Fi.] (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2004). An Internet version available in http://scripta. kotus.fi/visk/etusivu.php HAKULINEN (Auli) & al., Suomen kielen tulevaisuus – kielipoliittinen toimintaohjelma.[The future of Fi – an action programme] (Research Center for the languages of Finland 2009). Available in electronic form: http://scripta.kotus.fi/ www/verkkojulkaisut/julk7/ HAKULINEN (Lauri), Suomen kielen rakenne ja kehitys [Structure and Development of Fi.], (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Department of Finnish. Fifth, unchanged edition, 2000). HELLEMAA (Lahja-Irene) & al., Vanhan kirjasuomen sanakirja I—II [D. of Old Literary Fi.], (Helsinki: Research Center for the Languages of Finland & Government Stationary Office, 1985—1994). ITKONEN (Erkki) & al., Suomen sanojen alkuperä I—III. Etymologinen sanakirja. [The origin of the Fi. words. Etymological d.], (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society & Research Center for the Languages of Finland I: 1995, III: 2000). JÖNSSON-KORHOLA (Hannele) & al., Monena suomi maailmalla. Suomalaisperäisiä kielivähemmistöjä. [Fi. Abroad. Linguistic Minorities of Fi. Origin], (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society 2003). KARLSSON (Fred), Finnish: An Essential Grammar, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). KENTTÄ (Matti) & WINSA (Birger), Meän kielen sanakirja [D. of Meän kieli], (Luulaja: Kaamos, 1992). LEHTINEN (Marja) & al., Kielitoimiston sanakirja. Uusin tieto suomen kielen sanoista [The D. of the Fi. Language Office. Latest information on Fi. words. CD-ROM], (Helsinki: Kielikone Oy & Research Center for the Languages of Finland, 2004). LEHTINEN (Tapani), Kielen vuosituhannet. Suomen kielen kehitys kantauralista varhaissuomeen. [The millennia of a language. The development of Fi from ProtoUralic to Early Finnish. (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society 2007). McRAE (Kenneth D.), Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies. Finland. (Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters & Wilfried Lauries University Press, 1999). SADENIEMI (Matti) & al., Nykysuomen sanakirja I—VI [D. of Modern Fi.], (Helsinki: WSOY, 1951—1960). TUOMI (Tuomo) & al., Suomen murteiden sanakirja I—VII [D. of the Fi. Dialects], (Helsinki: Research Center for the Languages of Finland & Government Stationary Office, 1985—2005). VILKUNA (Maria), Free Word Order in Finnish. Its Syntax and Discourse Functions, (Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society, 1989).