Finnic languages

 

This article is about the Baltic Finnic languages. For other uses, see Finnic languages (disambiguation).

Finnic
Baltic Finnic
Ethnicity:	Baltic Finns
Geographic distribution:	Northern Fennoscandia, Baltic states, Southwestern and Southeastern Russia
Linguistic classification:	Uralic Finnic
Subdivisions:	Finnish Karelian Ludic Veps Ingrian Votic Estonian South Estonian (Võro, Seto) Livonian

The Finnic (Fennic) or Baltic Finnic (Balto-Fennic) languages are a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by about 7 million people.

The major modern representatives of the family are Finnish and Estonian, the official languages of their respective nation states. The other Finnic languages in the Baltic Sea region are Ingrian, Karelian, Ludic, Veps, and Votic, spoken around the Gulf of Finland and Lakes Onega and Ladoga. Võro and Seto (modern descendants of historical South Estonian) are spoken in south-eastern Estonia and Livonian in parts of Latvia.

The smaller languages are disappearing. In the 20th century both Livonian and Votic had fewer than 100 speakers left. Other groups of which there are records have long since disappeared.

Meänkieli (in northern Sweden) and Kven (in northern Norway) are Finnish dialects that the Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Norway have given the legal status of independent languages. They are mutually intelligible with Finnish.

The geographic centre of the maximum divergence between the languages is located south of the Gulf of Finland.

General characteristics

See also: Estonian grammar and Finnish grammar

There is no grammatical gender in Finnic languages, nor are there articles nor definite or indefinite forms.

The morphophonology (the way the grammatical function of a morpheme affects its production) is complex. One of the more important processes is the characteristic consonant gradation. Two kinds of gradation occur: the radical and suffix gradation, which affect the plosives /k/, /t/ and /p/. This is a lenition process, where the consonant is changed into a "weaker" form with some (but not all) oblique cases. For geminates, the process is simple to describe: they become simple stops, e.g. kuppi + -n → kupin (Finnish: "cup"). For simple consonants, the process complicates immensely and the results vary by the environment. For example, haka +-n → haan, kyky + -n → kyvyn, järki + -n → järjen (Finnish: "pasture", "ability", "intellect"). (See the separate article for more details.) Vowel harmony (lost in Livonian, generally also in Estonian and Veps) is also an important process. Historically, the "erosion" of word-final sounds (strongest in Livonian, Võro and Estonian) may leave a phonemic status to the morphophonological variations caused by the agglutination of the lost suffixes, which is the source of the third length level in these languages.

The original Uralic palatalization was lost in proto-Finnic, but most of the diverging dialects reacquired it. Palatalization is a part of the Estonian literary language and is an essential feature in Võro, as well as Veps, Karelian and other eastern Finnic languages. It is also found in East Finnish dialects, and is only missing from West Finnish dialects and Standard Finnish.

A special characteristic of the languages is the large number of diphthongs. There are 16 diphthongs in Finnish and 25 in Estonian; at the same time the frequency is greater in Finnish than in Estonian.

There are 14 noun cases in Estonian and 15 in Finnish, which are denoted by adding a suffix.

List of Finnic innovations

These features distinguish Finnic languages from other Uralic families:

• Development of long vowels and various diphthongs from loss of word-medial consonants such as *x, *j, *w, *ŋ
  • Before a consonant, the Uralic "laryngeal" *x yielded long vowels at an early stage (e.g. *tuxli "wind" → tuuli), but only the Finnic branch clearly preserves these as such. Later, the same process occurred also between vowels (e.g. *mëxi "land" → maa).
  • Semivowels *j, *w were usually lost when a root ended in *i and contained a preceding front (in the case of *j, e.g. *täji "tick" → täi) or rounded vowel (in the case of *w, e.g. *suwi "mouth" → suu).
  • The velar nasal *ŋ was vocalized to a semivowel in various positions (e.g. *joŋsi "bow" → jousi, *suŋi "summer" → suvi). In some cases further loss occurred (e.g. *müŋä "backside" → Estonian möö-, Finnish myö-).
• A development *š → h.
• Consonant gradation, most often for stops, but also found for some other consonants.
• Agreement of the attributes with the noun, e.g. in Finnish vanho·i·lle mieh·i·lle "to old men" the plural -i- and the case -lle is added also to the adjective.
• Use of a copula verb like on, e.g. mies on vanha "the man is old".
• Grammatical tenses analogous to Germanic tenses, i.e. the system with present, past, perfect and pluperfect tenses.
• The telic contrast of the object, which must be in the accusative case or partitive case.

Subclassification

The Finnic languages form a complex dialect continuum with few clear-cut boundaries. A division into two areal groups of four languages is usually used:

• Southern
  • (North) Estonian
  • Livonian
  • South Estonian
  • Votic

• Northern
  • Finnish
  • Ingrian
  • Karelian
  • Veps

All of these except Votic are centred on a literary standard language. Curonian may also fit here, if it is not a Baltic language.

In the Proto-Finnic period, three original dialects can be reconstructed: an inland dialect (South Estonian); a southwestern dialect (Livonian); and a northern dialect (the rest of the family). The last two can be grouped as a common Coastal group.

	Clusters *kt, *pt	Clusters *kc, *pc (IPA: *[kts], *[pts])	Cluster *čk (IPA: *[tʃk])	3rd person singular marker
South Estonian	*kt, *pt → tt	*kc, *pc → ts	*čk → tsk	endingless
Coastal Finnic	*kt, *pt → *ht	*kc, *pc → *ks, *ps	*čk → *tk	*-pi

Viitso (2000) surveys 59 isoglosses separating the family into 58 dialect areas (finer division is possible), finding that an unambiguous perimeter can be set up only for South Estonian, Livonian, Votic, and Veps. In particular, no isogloss exactly coincides with the geographical division into 'Estonian' south of the Bay of Finland and 'Finnish' north of it. Despite this, standard Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible.

The Southern group, excluding a few archaic coastal Estonian dialects and the highly Ingrian-influenced Kukkuzi Votic, is united by the presence of a ninth vowel phoneme õ, usually a close-mid back unrounded /ɤ/ (but a close central unrounded /ɨ/ in Livonian), as well as loss of *n before *s with compensatory lengthening. This may be contrasted with a Northern group comprising the remainder. However, more secure is the Eastern group, comprising East Finnish dialects as well as Ingrian, Karelian and Veps. This leaves the West Finnish dialects, within which the oldest division is that into Southwestern and Tavastian dialects.

Numerous new dialects have arisen through contacts of the old dialects: these include e.g. the more northern Finnish dialects (a mixture of West and East Finnish), and the Ludic varieties (probably originally Veps dialects but heavily influenced by Karelian).

See also

• Birch bark letter no. 292

External links

• Tapani Salminen. Problems in the taxonomy of the Uralic languages in the light of modern comparative studies.
• Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish
• Swadesh list for Finnic languages (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)