On lottovoitto syntyä Suomessa: Finnish

"It's like winning the lottery to be born Finnish," say Finland's proud inhabitants. Among the many benefits that accrue to native-born Finns is the chance to learn their bewilderingly-complex language from infancy. Having accomplished that, most anything else must look like a snap.

Intriguing history

Finnish is in a league with Basque for attracting linguistic attention, and for some of the same reasons. A Uralic language transplanted into the middle of Indo-European territory; stunning grammatical complexity; and an intriguing, titillatingly incomplete history; all combine to make Finnish the perfect icebreaker for any roomful of unacquainted linguists.

A discrete language in the heart of another family's territory is already odd. Just a handful of Uralic languages exist in northern Europe today, including Karelian, Lude, Vepsian, Vote, Sámi, and Livonian. Most are endangered; only Estonian and Finnish command national majorities. But the oddness doesn't end there. For starters, Finnish is related to Hungarian, a tradition centred a thousand miles south and east (and also isolated from other languages in its family.) Yet Finns are singularly unimpressed by this fact. "Our folklore says that we came from the east," they explain. Apparently, Finns and Magyars shared an ancestor people back on the central Asian steppe. (They may even share progeniture with the Japanese, if compelling similarities between the two languages are indicative.) At some point they turned west, a well-documented event in Western history. For some reason, the Finns' forebears passed up Hungary, persevering all the way to the Baltic Sea.

During the thousand years it took to arrive, the Finns encountered a wide range of cultures; scholars have identified loan words from long-extinct proto-Indo-European tongues in modern Finnish. Sata ("hundred") is one such relic. This aspect of Finnish makes it a priceless museum to historical linguists.

Finnish consistently presents students with contradictions and surprises. Its intricate grammar is legendary. Take the Finnish "case load." Nominal case, which doesn't exist in English or the Romance languages, entails affixing different endings on nouns according to the role they play in a sentence, i.e., subject, direct object, indirect object, etc. Esperanto has two cases. Latin has four. Russian, considered a case-heavy language, has six. But Finnish has fifteen.

And that's not all. (The phrase "that's not all" comes up repeatedly in discussions about Finnish.) Learners must also contend with sixteen patterns of consonant gradation, which dramatically change the way words are spelled and pronounced. I know of no unrelated language that has anything like this, and as may be imagined, it makes Finnish especially challenging to learn.