More than 90% of Americans believe that Finland is part of Scandinavia and that Finnish is consequently a Scandinavian language.

Actually, I made up that “more than 90%” claim. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it turned out to be correct. After all, if you look at a map like this one, Finland certainly appears to be part of Scandinavia:

But if you actually bother to read the article the map comes from, you’ll get a different picture. Although one definition of Scandinavia does include Finland and Iceland, the truth turns out to be (as it so often is) more complicated:

When referencing the geographic region of Scandinavia, there are three countries: Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Greenland, which is a Danish territory, and the Faroe Islands, which is a self-governing part of Denmark, are also included in the list.

Finland and Iceland are not considered part of Scandinavia geographically.

So much for geography. Culturally a better case can be made for including Finland. But my main concern here is neither geographical nor cultural but linguistic: is Finnish a Scandinavian language? In the title to this post I suggest that the answer is no, and indeed the answer is no. Not only is Finnish not a Scandinavian language, it isn’t even Indo-European!

So what’s going on here?

It’s true that Finnish is related to a handful of other geographically European languages, such as Estonian and (surprisingly) the non-contiguous Hungarian, but that’s about it. The standard joke in Hungary, showing typically inappropriate ethnic stereotyping, is that thousands of years ago a large group of migrants from what is now Ukraine (or Georgia, or Chechnya, or pick your own part of that region) traveled westward to what is now Poland and they came upon a sign at a T intersection:

Turn left to go to a beautiful land with moderate climate. Turn right to go to an impossibly cold land with a permanently frigid climate.

So the people who eventually became Hungarians turned left, and the people who became Finns and Estonians turned right.

Hungary now seems to have more mathematicians per capita than any other country, so ponder that.

OK, I keep avoiding the linguistic question. Finnish turns out to be a Finno-Ugric language, if that helps. Actually, even that classification is in dispute, since the taxonomy is not at all clear, but we do know for sure that it’s not Indo-European, even though Finland is indisputably in Europe. Maybe I should actually learn some Finnish, since it has some cool features like vowel harmony, a feature I loved when learning Turkish (an unrelated language that is also non-Indo-European). You might hope that the Wikipedia article on Finnish would turn out to be clear and accurate, like most Wikipedia articles about languages, but you would be disappointed. If you supplement it with the Wikipedia article on Finnish noun cases, you’ll get what appears to be a more complete picture, as far as I can tell. As you know, cases in English have almost completely disappeared (just nominative-objective-possessive for pronouns, and a fossilized possessive for nouns), but many readers of this blog will recall that Latin has five cases, which seems like enough. Readers with better memories or at any rate more Latin will remember that actually Latin has seven, since the list includes not merely nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and ablative, but also the much rarer vocative (“Et tu, Brute,” not “Et tu, Brutus) and locative. Surely seven is more than enough. Passing over the complications of nouns in Russian and Ukrainian, we return to what you’ve all waiting for: cases in Finnish. It turns out that Finnish cases include…wait for it…nominative, genitive, accusative, partitive, inessive, relative, illative, adhesive, ablative, ablative, essive, translative, instructive, abessive, and comitative.

Maybe I won’t try to learn Finnish after all.

Categories: Linguistics