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Finnish

Finnish

Summary

Finnish is natively spoken by about 5.1 million people, primarily in Finland, with smaller communities in Sweden and the Finnish diaspora. It is a crucial part of Finnish cultural identity, known for its epic poetry, such as the Kalevala, and its strong tradition in design and innovation. Written in the Latin alphabet, Finnish grammar features a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, 15 noun cases, and vowel harmony, making it distinct from many Indo-European languages.

Stats

  • Language Family: Uralic

  • Writing System: Latin

  • Writing System Type: Alphabet

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: N

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 15

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 4

  • Word Order: SVO

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 8

  • Number of Consonants: 17

Areas Where Spoken

  • Finland (official) (93.2%) (5.18 mil)

Resources

Free Lessons By Kaiku


Books

  • "Suomen mestari", that's probably the most popular book for learning Finnish. You can buy the book but if you search well, there's also some illegal versions lurking around :') You can also find some useful stuff in this link: https://kielibuusti.fi/kartoitustaulukko/ (just scroll down)


Websites


Videos

TV

Yle, the biggest news portal in Finland, also offers news in article and video formats in simplified Finnish (selkokieli), so you can check it out https://yle.fi/aihe/kielikoulu-sprakskolan https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/selkouutiset/

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