Finnish Language - Classification

Classification

Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages. The Finnic group also includes Estonian and other minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea.

Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with the Uralic languages in several respects including:

• Shared morphology:

• case suffixes such as genitive -n, partitive -(t)a / -(t)ä (< Uralic *-ta), essive -na / -nä
• plural markers -t and -i-
• possessive suffixes such as 1st person singular -ni (< Uralic *-mi), 2nd person singular -si (< Uralic *-ti).
• various derivational suffixes

• Shared basic vocabulary displaying regular sound correspondences with the other Uralic languages.

Several theories exist as to the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages. The most widely held view is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga. The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar.

The Finns are more genetically similar to their Indo-European speaking neighbours than to the speakers of the geographically close Uralic language Sami. It has been argued that a native Finnic-speaking population absorbed northward migrating Indo-European speakers who adopted the Finnic language, giving rise to the modern Finns.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, classifies Finnish as a level III language (of 4 levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers.