Finnish

Finnish is a member of the Uralic language family, specifically belonging to the Finnic branch. It is the official language of Finland and is also spoken by Finnish communities in other countries, such as Sweden, Norway, and Russia. Finnish is spoken by approximately 5 million people worldwide.

Finnish is an agglutinative language, which means that words can have multiple endings and affixes to convey different meanings. This can result in long and complex words. Finnish has 15 grammatical cases, making its case system more extensive than that of many other European languages. Additionally, Finnish features vowel harmony, a linguistic phenomenon where certain vowels tend to co-occur within words.

The Finnish alphabet is based on the Latin script and consists of 29 letters, including the standard 26 Latin letters, as well as the letters Ä, Ö, and Å. Finnish pronunciation is generally consistent, with each letter representing one sound. The language does not have grammatical gender and has relatively simple rules for articles.

Finnish is closely related to other Finnic languages, such as Estonian and Karelian, and shares some similarities with other Uralic languages, like Hungarian and Sami. However, it is not related to the Germanic, Romance, or Slavic languages, which makes it more challenging for speakers of these languages to learn Finnish.

How hard is it to learn Finnish?

Finnish can be challenging for an English speaker to learn, but the difficulty level can vary depending on the individual's language learning ability, motivation, and time investment. Finnish belongs to the Uralic language family, which is entirely different from the Germanic language family to which English belongs. As a result, Finnish has very few similarities to English in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure.

Most learners from English can master the Finnish language with around 44 weeks of study.