Finnish Translations

POZENA’s professional Finnish translations

• Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric group, which is a branch of the Uralic language family. It was not until the modern era that this language started to develop more rapidly (earlier it had been used only in speech). A key role in regulating the orthographic norms for Finnish was played by bishop Mikael Agricola, who translated religious texts, and in 1543 he wrote Abckiria (the ABC book), the first book published in the Finnish language.
• Suomi is a language with high dialectal variation. There are three major groups of dialects: northern, western and eastern. The greatest differences are found in pronunciation, and – to a smaller extent – at the level of lexis. The official standard and spoken colloquial Finnish, which is based on the Helsinki dialect, also vary considerably. The norms of Finnish are regulated by the Institute of the Languages of Finland, which deals with the standardization of all languages spoken in Finland.
• Finnish is one of the EU’s official languages.

• Finnish is an agglutinative language, in which morphemes are suffixed to word stems to form new words or word forms. Semantically, such a word corresponds to several words in most Indo-European languages. For example, the English equivalent of the Finnish word vaimollenikin is the phrase ‘also to my wife’.
• Another interesting feature of Finnish grammar is 15 noun cases. There is no grammatical gender, though. Finnish has just a single third person singular pronoun hän for he and she.
• Word stress in Finnish is fixed and usually falls on the first syllable.
• The longest Finnish word is the 61-letter noun lentokone-suihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas, whose meaning is ‘airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student’.
• As regards the Finnish writing system, the letter å occurs only in Swedish loanwords. Interestingly, the letter appeared as a major element on a campaign logo against mandatory Swedish in Finnish schools (Swedish also holds official status in Finland).