Origin of Finnish and related languages

By Ulla-Maija Kulonen, Department of Finno-Ugrian Studies, University of Helsinki, May 2000

© Finnish Tourist Board

The ancient Finno-Ugrian word stock contains words referring to water, but they all concern inland waterways and freshwater fauna. Rivers, inland waterfowl and freshwater fish constitute the most typical Finno-Ugrian word stock.

Finnish belongs to the Baltic-Finnic group of the Finno-Ugrian or Uralic language family. It is the largest language in its group, the next largest being Estonian. The Baltic-Finnic language group is one of the westernmost branches of the Finno-Ugrian language family; only the Sámi territory in western and northern Norway extends further west. In the east, the domain of the language family extends to the Yenisey river and the Taimyr peninsula, and the farthest outpost to the south comprises the Hungarians, in the Carpathian basin of Central Europe.

Present-day Finno-Ugrian languages and their territories

In all, about 23 million people speak the languages of the Finno-Ugrian language family. However, many of the languages are tiny: apart from Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, they are all threatened minority tongues whose territories lie within the Russian Federation.

Even within the Baltic-Finnic group, the languages of Karelian, Vepsian, Ludian and the remnants of Ingrian dialects and Votian are spoken only in Russia. Although the Karelians have their own republic, which belongs to the Russian Federation, only 10% of the republic’s population is Karelian-speaking; there is also a sizeable Karelian population in the Tver region outside the republic. The evolution of a standard written language was hampered until recently by fragmentation into several highly disparate dialects.

Many other Uralic languages, even some of the most widely spoken, suffer from the same problem. The traditional territory of Livonian is along the shores of Courland in Latvia. Only a handful of Livonian speakers remain.

The Baltic-Finnic group

The Baltic-Finnic group thus 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, though without training, a Finn cannot really understand Estonian. These two languages are therefore not as closely related as the Scandinavian languages are to each other.

However, the Baltic-Finnish group consists of continua formed by 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, Aunus or Livvi, closely resembles Ludian and Vepsian.

The Saami language group

The Saami language group forms a geographic and linguistic continuum. Its home region extends from the North Sea coast in central Norway, along a strip of coast 100 km to 200 km wide, to the eastern tip of the Kola peninsula. There are Saami speakers in four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

There are ten Saami languages, Northern Saami being the largest; it is spoken in all three Scandinavian countries. The main language in the Kola peninsula is Kildin Saami, while in the more southern areas of Sweden and Norway, the language is Southern Saami. Saami languages spoken in Finland include Inari Saami and Skolt Saami (the latter is also spoken in the Kola peninsula), with a few hundred speakers each; these languages are highly threatened.

There is only one hiatus in the continuum of Saami languages; this runs between Northern Saami and Inari Saami, dividing the languages into western and eastern sub-groups. Otherwise, the continuum means that adjacent languages are fairly closely related and a neighbour’s speech is always intelligible.

The exact number of Saami is not known, as the definition of ‘Saami’ varies from one country to the next. Estimates range from 50,000 to 80,000.

The largest Saami population is in Norway, the smallest in Russia (some 4,000, of whom only 1,500 speak the vernacular). Many minor Saami languages are on the verge of extinction (Ume and Pite Saami in Sweden and Akkala Saami in Russia), while the speakers of many others are numbered in dozens or hundreds (Southern Saami in Sweden and Norway, Inari and Skolt Saami in Finland, and Ter Saami in Russia).

Photo: Matti Tirri
There are ten Saami languages, Northern Saami being the largest; it is spoken in all three Scandinavian countries. Sámis celebrating their great feast day, 'Maria Day', in the town of Hetta.

The Saami are not mere reindeer herders, though this is the main source of livelihood for many of them, the Northern Saami in particular. Fishing is the chief occupation for many of the ‘Forest Saami’ (especially the Inari and the Skolt) and the ‘Sea Saami’ of the Arctic coast.

Central Russia is home to the Mari, the Mordvin, the Komi and the Udmurt

Central Russia is home to three main groups of the Finno-Ugrian language family: Mari, the Mordvin languages and the Permian languages.

The Mordvin, the Mari, the Komi and the Udmurt each constitute a minority group within a republic bearing its name.

Altogether there are some 1,150,000 Mordvin, only just over 300,000 of whom live in the Mordvinian Republic. Two thirds of the republic’s inhabitants are non-Mordvin, mainly Russians and Tatars.

Photo: Kauri Mikkola
Women's festival in Joskar-Ola, the capital of the Mari Republic in the summer of 1998. The Mari language is divided into three main dialects that could be considered independent languages.

The remaining Mordvin are scattered over a territory reaching east from the republic all the way to the Ural Mountains, spanning several republics. The Mordvinian Republic itself lies southeast of Moscow, nestled in the great bend of the Volga.

The Mari have their own republic, located east of Moscow, mainly on the north side of the middle Volga.

The total number of Mari is approximately 670,000, half of whom live in the republic. The largest Mari population outside the Mari Republic (106,000 people) lives in Bashkiria to the east.

East-northeast of the Mari Republic lies the Udmurt Republic, with some 500,000 ethnic Udmurt among its population of one and a half million.

A further quarter of a million Udmurt live outside the republic, chiefly in the adjacent regions of Kirov and Perm and in the Tatar and Bashkir Republics.

The Udmurt Republic lies within the traditionally multi-ethnic Russian heartland, with plentiful natural resources and a substantial processing industry which has brought people of many different nationalities to the region.

The Mari and the Mordvin language

The Mari language is divided into three main dialects that could be considered independent languages. Attempts to create a written language to cover all three have failed.

Photo: Merja Salo
Preservers of their Mordvin language Natalya Vasilyevna Botskanova and her granddaughter Marina from the Erzya village of Katselai in Mordovia. The background shows an icon niche.

There are two Mordvin languages, Erzya and Moksha. These have a total of about one million speakers between them, and thus the Mordvin are the third largest group in the language family after the Hungarians and the Finns; there are about as many Mordvin speakers as there are Estonian speakers.

Both Erzya and Moksha are written languages.

Permian languages

There are three Permian languages: Komi, Permyak and Udmurt.

The Komi can be divided into two groups — the Komi (Zyryan) and the Permyak — on linguistic and cultural grounds. Both groups have their own territories: the Komi inhabit most of the Komi Republic, a large area rich in resources, located between the Province of Archangel and the Ural Mountains at approximately the same latitudes as Finland but larger than Finland by one third.

The Permyak have a district of their own at the republic’s southern edge.

There are approximately half a million ethnic Komi, including 150,000 Permyak. Some 70% of each group speak the national language.

Ugric languages

The widest known distribution of the Uralic languages is indicated by the colored areas. The screened areas show the present distribution of the languages. Recent settlements outside traditional territory have not been indicated. The screened areas may consist of smaller enclaves of factual distribution, or include uninhabited areas or areas in which other languages are spoken.

The group of Ugric languages is linguistically uniform but geographically diffuse. In particular, the link between Hungarian and the Ob-Ugric languages spoken on the Siberian side of the Ural Mountains has been (and still is) considered uncertain, but from a purely linguistic viewpoint the relationship is indubitable. Of course, there is no question of closely related languages in this group as there is in the groups presented above, but this is also true of the Samoyed languages.

These groupings are based not so much on kinship and mutual intelligibility as on historical innovations that separate languages from other branches and language groups in the language family.

Thus, the Ugric group contains Hungarian and also the Ob-Ugrian languages of Khanty and Mansi, both spoken over an extensive area of westernmost Siberia, along the Ob and its tributaries.

There are fewer than 30,000 Khanty and Mansi combined, and fewer than half of them actually speak their own languages.

The geographical gulf in this group can be explained by the fact that the Hungarians were caught up in mass migrations in southern Russia and thus ended up far away from their ancient homeland around the Ural Mountains.

The Ob-Ugrians, on the other hand, probably only recently spread out along the taiga towards the north, even as far as the tundra in the case of the Khanty, adopting reindeer husbandry from the Samoyed who had been living in that area since time immemorial.

The Khanty and Mansi have their own district; the indigenous people only account for a few per cent of the population. Most of the population consists of various nationalities, brought to the area by the oil and gas industry.

Samoyed group

The Samoyed group today contains four northern and one southern language. There used to be more southern Samoyed languages, but by the last century they had by and large been absorbed by the Turkic languages of Siberia.

Photo: Merja Salo
Green-shirted Maksim Stepanovich Otsamov, surrounded by his wife, sister and sister’s children, is a teacher of Khanty. Some Khanty still wear traditional clothing daily. The family lives in the village of Tugyany on the River Ob.

Today, the only southern Samoyed language left is the Selkup; these people, about 1,500 in all, live along the Yenisey, east of the Khanty.

The largest northern Samoyed people are the Nenets, with a population of about 30,000. They live in a zone in the northern tundra extending from around the mouth of the Yenisey to the eastern parts of the Kola peninsula.

The minor northern Samoyed languages are Yurats, Enets and Nganasan.