How Finnish Survived: The Unlikely History of Europe’s Loneliest Language
Every other language in northern Europe has relatives at the party. Swedish chats with Danish, Russian with Ukrainian, German with everyone whether they like it or not. Finnish stands at the edge of the room with Estonian, its one close friend, and a Hungarian cousin it last saw several thousand years ago. It should not have survived. It had no state, no army, no written form for most of its existence and seven centuries of rulers who administered, taught and prayed in other languages. It survived anyway, and the history of the Finnish language is one of Europe’s great quiet stubbornness epics.
A language without a country
The history of the Finnish language starts long before Finland did. Finnish belongs to the Uralic family, which arrived in the Baltic region thousands of years before the Indo-European languages that now surround it. For most of recorded history it was a spoken language only, passed between farmers, fishermen and rune singers while power spoke something else. From the Middle Ages Finland was the eastern half of the Swedish kingdom, and Swedish was the language of law, administration and advancement. Finnish was what you spoke at home, in the forest and to your horse.
Writing arrived with the Reformation. Mikael Agricola, the bishop of Turku, decided Finns should read scripture in their own tongue and had to invent written Finnish to make it possible. His ABC book appeared around 1543 and his Finnish New Testament in 1548, and in choosing spellings and coining vocabulary he effectively built the language’s literary foundations single-handedly. Finland still celebrates his death day, 9 April, as the Day of the Finnish Language, which tells you how the country ranks its heroes.
The century that saved the Finnish language
In 1809 Sweden lost Finland to Russia, and the change of landlord turned out to be the language’s luck. As an autonomous Grand Duchy under the tsar, Finland needed an identity that was neither Swedish nor Russian, and the nationalists of the 19th century found it in the language of the countryside. The rallying sentiment of the era, often attributed to the agitator Adolf Ivar Arwidsson, ran along the lines of: Swedes we are no longer, Russians we do not want to become, so let us be Finns.
The movement got its sacred text in 1835 when Elias Lönnrot, a country doctor who spent his holidays walking Karelia collecting folk poetry, stitched centuries of oral rune song into the Kalevala. A national epic, assembled from the memories of illiterate singers, in a language officialdom had ignored for 600 years: it electrified the educated classes, many of whom promptly began learning the language they were championing. Swedish-speaking intellectuals Fennicised their names, philosopher J. V. Snellman argued that a nation without its own language was a contradiction, and in 1863 Tsar Alexander II signed a decree putting Finnish on the road to equal official status. By independence in 1917 the peasant language had become a language of parliament, newspapers, novels and eventually Nobel-winning literature.
The professor who fell into the wine cellar
The Kalevala’s strangest legacy runs through Oxford. A teenage J. R. R. Tolkien read it in translation, was thunderstruck and later taught himself enough Finnish to attempt the original. He described encountering a Finnish grammar as “like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine”. The intoxication had consequences: Quenya, the high Elvish language of The Lord of the Rings, is built on Finnish bones, borrowing its vowel harmony, its case endings and its music. Tolkien’s first attempt at fiction was a retelling of the Kalevala’s doomed Kullervo, a story that grew up to become Túrin Turambar in The Silmarillion. Every reader who has ever admired Elvish has been admiring Finnish at one remove.
Still alone, still here
Seven centuries into the history of the Finnish language, it remains gloriously itself: fifteen cases, no articles, no grammatical gender, no future tense and a habit of welding words together until they need scaffolding. Around five and a half million people now speak the tongue that spent 700 years being told it was nobody important, in a country where ancient rituals make a habit of outliving empires. The rune singers would recognise the stubbornness, and Agricola would recognise the spelling, because Finnish is still written exactly as it sounds.
And if the survival story tempts you to try the survivor, start where the language keeps its oldest power: perkele began as a thunder god before it became Finland’s most versatile swear word, which is its own small history of the country. The language waited 700 years to be taken seriously. It can wait while you learn to say kiitos.
