§1 THE RELATION OF FINNISH TO OTHER
LANGUAGES
The Finnish language is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family. This
is quite different from the Indo-European family, to which languages such
as Swedish, English, French, German, Russian, Persian and Hindi belong.
only four of the major Finno-Ugric languages are spoken outside Russia:
Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and the Sámi (‘Lappish’) languages in the
north of Finland, Norway, Sweden and the far north-west of Russia. The
term ‘Lappish’ is derogatory.
The languages most closely related to Finnish are Estonian, Karelian,
Vepsian, Ludian, Votian and Livonian, which are all spoken around the south
and east of the Gulf of Finland. Of these Finnic languages Finnish and
Estonian are spoken most widely. These two are so similar in grammar and
vocabulary, so closely related, that after a little practice Finns and Estonians
can understand each other’s languages fairly well. If we group together the
other Finno-Ugric languages according to their relations to each other and to
Finnish, we have the following traditional picture:
The Finno-Ugric languages
Finni sh Estonian Sámi (Lapp) Mordvin Komi (Zyryan) Hanti (Ostyak)
Karelian Mari (Cheremis) Udmurt (Votyak)
Mansi (Vogul)
Vepsian Hungarian
Ludian
Votian
Livonian
→ → → → → → increasing distance from Finnish → → → → → →
Finnish and Hungarian are thus quite distant from each other, and the relation
between these two languages can really only be established on historical
linguistic grounds. Roughly speaking, Finnish is as far from Hungarian as
English or German is from Persian.
2 Finnish: An Essential Grammar
Population of Finland by first language
Samoyed languages are spoken by a few small groups of people in the
north of Russia, especially in western Siberia. The Finno-Ugric languages
and the Samoyed languages constitute the Uralic language family. The
number of speakers of Uralic languages varies considerably. Six Uralic
languages have more than 500,000 speakers: Hungarian (14 million), Finnish
(5 million), Estonian (1 million), Mordvin (Erzya and Moksha, 750,000),
Mari (550,000), and Udmurt (500,000). Several Uralic languages have very
few speakers and their future is gravely endangered. This is true of all four
remaining Samoyed languages, and of Hanti (13,000), Mansi (3,000), the ten
Sámi languages (30,000), Livonian (30), Votian (50), Ludian (5,000), and
Vepsian (6,000).
