How exotic a language is Finnish after all? Facts and myths about a vital North European language

When the Finnish language is compared to the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe, it may give the impression that Finnish is exotic. However, the number of languages spoken in Europe is only a fraction, around 3.5 %, of the total number of languages spoken in the world. What seems exotic from a European perspective may be quite common from a global perspective. Indeed, it is sometimes the Indo-European languages of Europe, not Finnish, that are exotic from a global point of view. Finnish belongs to the Uralic language family, as do Karelian, Estonian, Sami languages, Mordvian, Mari and Hungarian, among others. In the Uralic languages, many grammatical meanings are expressed by suffixes. In addition, one of the characteristic features of Uralic languages has been considered to be the agglutinative technique: the suffixes are "glued" to the word stem so that the stem and the suffix remain unchanged. It is likely that agglutination was a key technique in the Uralic protolanguage. Modern Finnish is also often taken as an example of an agglutinative language. However, in modern Finnish there are almost 30 inflectional classes of nominals, and they are based on fusional stem variation. Only in a couple of inflectional classes can we speak of pure agglutination. This presentation will examine the lexico-grammar of Finnish from both a European and a global perspective. What is fact, what is fiction when it comes to this North European language?

Speaker: Doc. Yrjö Lauranto, Ph.D.