III. Finglish (the peculiar mixture of Finnish with English spoken by Finnish immigrants)

Map of Europe    

Land of lakes. Views outside the summer cabin near Nilsiä, Finland. Middle picture: Fishing. Lower picure: midnight on Midsummer's eve at Turula.

Urho K. Kekkonen (from the Finnish President's Home Page)

Olavinlinna, site of the annual Savonlinna Opera Festival, where world-famous singers like Karita Mattila and Matti Salminen have performed.

The essence of the sauna. Picture borrowed from Virtual Finland.

Statue of the legendary Flying Finn, located in the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki. Pavo Nurmi set world records and won Olympic gold medals throughout the 1920s.

It doesn't look like much now, but click on it and see! Puts Finland into a Northern Hemisphere perspective.

Introduction. Finland is one of the northernmost countries of Europe. Finland is the easternmost of the countries making up the Nordic Council (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland). Although Finland is often referred to as Scandinavian, technically it is not, because Scandinavian refers to the northern Germanic language branch and their peoples. Because of the deep historical and cultural ties, Finland has long been part of the Nordic community. Citizens of the Nordic countries can move freely among other Nordic countries without passports, can live and work in other Nordic countries without residence or work permits and are entitled to social benefits when living in another Nordic country. 

People. The ancestors of today's Finns consisted of different tribes like Karelians and Tavastians, who migrated into Finland from Estonia in the south and southwest, and Karelia in the east. Finns are very homogeneous genetically (an advantage in scientific research). Finns and Estonians share two-thirds of their genes: 25-50% of Finnish genes are Baltic, approximately 25% Siberian (Asian) and 25-50% Germanic.

The Sámi were already in Finland, and were apparently pushed north by the Finnish tribes. The Sámi speak a Finno-Ugrian language (actually languages) also, but are genetically distinct from both Finns and Siberians. Finns themselves call the country "Suomi", although Finland is the name used in most languages.

The population of Finland today is a little over 5 million. 93% of the 5 million Finns speak Finnish. Only about 6% of Finns speak Swedish, mainly along the coast to the south and west. For cultural and historical reasons, however, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages in Finland.  

Land. Finland is rightly known as a land of forests, which cover roughly three quarters of the country's surface area of 338,000 sq. km. Other outstanding features of Finland's scenery are its myriad of lakes (over 65,000 of them) and islands. Lakes and other bodies of water cover 10% of the national territory. 

Climate. Finland has short but beautiful summers. Days are long, and in the arctic, the summer never sets. Winters are long, and snow covers the ground from December through April in all but southern coastal areas. The price for summer days in which the sun never sets, during the winter in the arctic the sun never rises.

Arts and sports. Finland has produced opera stars, composers, conductors, architects, top distance runners, skiers, ski jumpers, hockey players and race car drivers well out proportion to its size.

Economy. Finland has a market economy based primarily on the paper and lumber industry, metal industry and the ship industry, the latter of which has been in decline. The electronic and high technolgy industry has played an increasingly important role in the Finnish economy, with Nokia in the forefront.

Government. Finland has a parliamentary system of government located in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Finland also has a president, whose primary role is in foreign policy. The power of the president (currently Tarja Halonen) is now far more restricted than it was in the days of strong man Urho K. Kekkonen, who ruled Finland from 1956-1982.

Sauna. But better than forests, lakes or even Nokia, Finland is known for the sauna.

Finnish History in a nutshell (for a much more informative and colorful but somewhat longer nutshell history, see Virtual Finland’s Chronology of Finnish History)

The following has been borrowed heavily from Pasi Kuoppamäki’s Web History of Finland (worth visiting, has a lot of good links). But don’t blame him for any mistakes, because those are probably due to my modifications. For the best overall introduction to Finland, its people' culture, language, and history, see Virtual Finland.  

• Around 8000 B.C.: people arrive in Finland.
• 4000 B.C. - 1100 A.D.: Finns form tribes and inhabit larger parts of the country. The Sámi are pushed north.
• 1100 - 1350: Sweden and Novgorod (Russia) compete over Finland, and the border of Finland shifts from east to west. Finns are divided in their preferences. Most of the area becomes part of the Swedish kingdom. Christianity spreads from the West and the East.
• 1350 - 1809: Finland is an integral part of Sweden. Although Swedish is the language of government, Finnish is spoken by over 85% of the population.  
• 1812: The capital moves from Turku to Helsinki, its present location.
• 1809 - 1917: Finland is annexed by Russia as an autonomous Grand Duchy.
• 1901: Ida Laaksonen and her four small children leave Finland for the US. Otto had already left.  
• 1914: Johannes Happonen leaves Finland for the US for the first time, and again in 1922. His wife Alma joins him in 1916.
• 1917 - 1918: Finland becomes an independent republic and fights a bitter and brutal civil war.  The Reds (socialists) lose to the Whites (Republicans). Finland is a poor agrarian society.
• 1923: Hilja Happonen leaves Litmaniemi, where she had grown up in a small cabin as a sharecropper's daughter and worked as a servant, for Detroit.
• Late 1920s: Finnish land reform – the sharecroppers are given rights to farmland.  
• 1935: Alma Happonen returns to Finland and gives birth to Alisa. Alma returns t the US, and Alisa is raised by her aunt Lyyli in Litmaniemi.
• 1939: War threatens, and Alma returns to Finland to bring Alisa to the US, changing their original plans of returning permanently to Finland. The Winter War breaks out. Finland is invaded by the Soviet Union. The Finns lose, and cede much of eastern Karelia to the Soviet Union.
• 1940-1945: To get back Karelia and defend itself against the Soviet Union, Finland allies itself with Germany against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union wins. The Finns drive 200,000 Germans out of Finland as part of the terms of surrender. The Germans slash and burn Lapland as they retreat. Finland remains an independent democratic market economy, but Soviet Union takes large areas of Karelia. About 450,000 people flee the ceded areas to Finland.
• 1945-1950s: The Finns were forced by the Soviet Union to pay a harsh war debt. Incredibly, they were able to pay the debt off, industrializing in the process. People migrate to the cities and southern Finland.
• 1950s-1970s: Finland successfully develops a nordic welfare system similar to that in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The friendship treaty with the Soviet Union and the policy of neutrality (to a certain extent acquiescence to the East) is a political reality and economically advantageous to Finland, but leads to derogatory terms such as Finlandization.
• The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Only in part related to this, Finland enters a deep and  prolonged recession, with unemployment reaching 25%. Alisa  buys a lakeside cabin near Kuopio and spends summers there.
• Mid-to-late 1990s: Finnish economic growth powered in part by Nokia blossoms in the mid and late 1990s, although employment figures only slowly decline.
• 1995: Finland joins the European Union.
• 2002: The Euro becomes the official currency of Finland, replacing the mark (see coins also).

An interesting analogy is the history of Estonia, the people of whom are closely related to the Finns. Estonia has throughout its history been dominated mainly by Nordic nations, Russia, and most recently the Soviet Union. Estonia achieved independence also in 1918, but was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in the beginning of WWII became independent in 1991 as the Soviet Union disintegrated.

                                     

The swan, Finland's national bird.

A nature shot borrowed from fellow American Brent Cassidy's site.

Finlandia Hall, designed by the famous architect Alvar Aalto - not a good picture, but it'll have to do for now.  

NHL hockey player Teemu Selanne

Olympic gold medalist Mika Myllylä in better days.

Cousin Veikko Happonen was killed in the Winter War.

Finnish ski troops in February 1940. (©SA-kuva from the Finnish Defense Forces web site).

Veljmies at the tori in front of the Shop Hall in Kuopio.

Maybe Finnish isn't all that hard. At leas it's logical.

Finnish has a notorious reputation for being a difficult language. It is not difficult, of course, for Finns and those speaking languages related to Finnish. That is because Finnish is part of the Finno-Ugric language family, which differs greatly in structure and vocabulary from Indo-European languages like English.

Finno-Ugric Languages (basically a synopsis of the text written for Virtual Finland by Ulla-Maija Kulonen, Professor of the Department of Finno-Ugrian Studies, University of Helsinki)

Present-day Finno-Ugrian languages and their territories

 Group             Languages                            Number of Speakers

The Baltic-Finnic group

The Baltic-Finnic group consists of seven languages, with only Finnish and Estonian being large and viable. The languages are closely related, and a Finn and an Estonian can learn to communicate without unduly great effort. Before WWII Karelian, also very closely related to Finnish, was viable, but now  only 10% of the Karelian Republic of the Russian Federation is Karelian-speaking.

The Baltic-Finnish group consists of a continua of languages that are more or less closely related. For example, the northernmost dialects of Karelian are quite close to the dialects of eastern Finland (so much so that they are mutually intelligible), while the southernmost Karelian dialect closely resembles the Ludian and Vepsian languages.

The Saami language group

The Saami language group forms a geographic and linguistic continuum. There are Saami speakers in four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. There are ten Saami languages.

The Mari, the Mordvin, the Komi and the Udmurt

Three main groups of the Finno-Ugrian language family are located in central Russia. The Mari, Mordvin and Permian languages are all threatened minority languages.

Permian languages

There are three Permian languages: Komi, Permyak and Udmurt, located between the Province of Archangel and the Ural Mountains.

Ugric languages

Samoyed group

 

The widest known and current distribution of the Finn-Ugrian languages.

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