Finnish

Why Swedish rule kept Finnish out of official use

Under Swedish rule Finnish was only spoken. Swedish was the language of administration, Latin that of the church and Middle Low German that of trade, and Finnish speakers could use their language only in daily life. Swedish rule ended in 1809, and in the Grand Duchy of Finland that followed, and with the Fennoman movement behind it, Finnish gained official standing through the Language Rescript of 1863, an imperial decree. Johan Vilhelm Snellman and others pressed for it as a full national language, and by the end of the century it had become one.

How Agricola's spelling outlived the sounds

Mikael Agricola built the first full writing system in the 16th century, on the western dialects, borrowing from Swedish, German and Latin to prepare a Bible translation. He wrote k, c and q for one sound and wavered between dh and d; the fricative spelled d later vanished from most speech, but Agricola's d survived in writing, and Standard Finnish now pronounces it d because of the spelling.

Today each sound has one letter; long vowels and consonants are written double. The letters ä and ö are native, while b, c, f, q, w, x, z, å, š and ž appear only in foreign words. A colon joins an ending to an abbreviation, as in EU:ssa, in the EU.

Which Finnish is written and which is spoken

Finns move between the standard language, yleiskieli, used in newscasts and formal speech and written as kirjakieli, and the spoken language, puhekieli, heard at work and on television. The Language Office of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland prescribes the standard. Finnish has been an official language of the European Union since 1995.