I'm going to answer another frequently asked question: "Is Finnish closely related to Swedish?"
No. Finnish does have lots of loanwords from Swedish, and that’s because the area was under Swedish rule for centuries and there’s still a Swedish-speaking minority living in Finland. But really Finnish is part of a completely different language family called Uralic languages. Swedish (along with English) is a Germanic language, part of the family called Indo-European languages.
Culturally Finland is quite similar to the other Northern Countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) so that’s one reason why it confuses people when I say that Finnish is not related to languages spoken in those countries. The next question usually is ”well, what is it related to then?”. There are in fact a lot of related languages, it’s just that most of them are such "small" languages (meaning they only have a small amount of speakers), that no-one’s ever heard of them!
This map shows how the Uralic languages are spread! A lot of them are tiny minority languages in Russia, probably nearly extinct. A lot of people regocnise Estonian and Hungarian, when I say Finnish is related to them, but probably have never heard of Sami, Komi or Moksha. (By the way, Russian belongs to the same family as Swedish and English (Indo-European) but it’s part of a sub-branch called Slavic languages. So again, not related to Finnish.)
These languages had a common ancestor (in the same way as humans and chimpanzees) which I think is nowadays called Proto-Uralic. The people(s) who spoke this language originated from the Ural mountains area (which is located in Russia). You can sort of see from the map how some of the peoples migrated west from the Ural mountains. One part of the people settled in the area currently known as Finland and their language developed into Finnish, another part settled in Estonia, and another migrated all the way to the area known as Hungary.
When I tell people that Finnish is related to for example Estonian and Hungarian, they often ask me if I could understand those languages. No. Definitely not. Estonian sounds very much like Finnish, and there are some words that are very similar, but I wouldn’t straight away be able to understand it. I’d say it would be a lot easier for me to learn Estonian than, say, Japanese! Hungarian, on the other hand, separated from the other languages so long ago that it sounds completely different and there aren't really any visible similarities between the languages either.
By the way, people are often really surprised when I mention that Swedish is really close to English! I mean, of course they don’t sound alike (anymore), but they have loads of really similar words and structures too. If you’ve ever heard or read Old English, it really sounds and looks like Swedish! Here's a little table which tries to prove that Swedish and English are closer to each other than Swedish and Finnish:
I hope I didn't make any mistakes there...
One interesting example (that I often like to share) is the word ”house”. In Swedish it’s ”hus” and that’s what it used to be in Old English, too! The current spelling is due to French influence (I guess they invaded England at some point). They spell the u-sound in hus with ”ou”. And you know how they like to add random ”e’s” at the ends of words ---> house. (I learned this from a book when I was studying for my entrance exam for English. I hope I remember it correctly)
I happen to be interested in languages and their history, I even studied languages in university for a while. But I decided I didn’t want it as a career after all, so I’m obviously not an expert. A lot of the stuff I wrote is just based on what I remember learning in school and university, and just things I found online! And the point of this is just to shortly explain what Finnish is, where it’s from and ”who” are its relatives!
