| Also Known As: Suomi,Suomea,Finnish
Description:
Finnish ( suomi (help·info), or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% as of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. It is one of the 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, which is closely related to Finnish, is an official minority language in Norway.
Finnish is the eponymous member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects the forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence.
Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric group of languages which in turn is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The Baltic-Finnic subgroup also includes Estonian and other minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea.
Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with the Uralic languages in several respects including:
Several theories exist as to the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages, but the most widely held view is that they..... full article at Wikipedia |
