- An official language of Finland (together with Swedish). There are approximately 6 million speakers of Finnish, one of the few languages of Europe not belonging to the Indo-European family. Like Estonian, spoken across the Gulf of Finland, it is one of the Finno-Ugric languages, which constitute the main branch of the Uralic family. The Finnish alphabet contains only thirteen consonants and eight vowels. There is only one sound for every letter, one letter for every sound, and the stress is always on the first syllable. The language makes no distinction as to gender, and has no articles, either definite or indefinite. Despite these simplifying factors, Finnish is undoubtedly an exceedingly difficult language to learn. The number of case forms for nouns is staggering: while German has four cases, Latin five, and Russian six, Finnish has no fewer than fifteen. In addition to the familiar nominative, genitive, partitive, and ablative, there are also the elative, allative, illative, essive, inessive, adessive, abessive, and several others. In linguistics, Finnish is defined as a synthetic language meaning that it uses suffixes to express grammatical relations and also to derive new words. In contemporary spoken Finnish, however, the tendency is to move from synthetic to analytic expression, where grammatical relations are expressed by word order, prepositions and other auxiliary words rather than flexion.

Translated by: MANUEL JESÚS FIERRO GARCÍA

- A person of Finnish birth or nationality

Translated by: FARHAD PEZESHKI