【芬兰语语法】§1 THE RELATION OF FINNISH TO OTHER LANGUAGES

 §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).