Future of Finnish Language

[dave071061]

And I hope Cymric is doing fine, too!

Cymraeg is doing very well these days, with a fairly steady increase of young users in the south, and it has always been strong in Mid and North wales!

As for English taking over from Finnish, Not a chance! Just take a trip outside of ring 3 once in a while! Swedish would be more likely to fall into disuse if the goverment didn't protect it!

[dusty_bin]

I did not suggest that Finnish will disappear fast, or soon, but already, English has become accpeted as a normal language in Finland. There is plenty of advertsing in English (a good sign of how far the language has already become integrated), English is becoming a standard in official documents, many firms use English as their business language for everything except client facing work. The friends I mentioned, were part of a group that had studied, trained and worked in English for five or six years, let alone what they had studied at school. These folk are rare now, but in fifty years?

There are about 3 million Welsh and about 600,000 users and jsut a few monlinguals, the language survives becasue it is kept on intensive care, there is no real reason for anyone to speak it except to talk to granny, or the dim gardner. People use it, in reality, as a nationalistic statement and as a pretension. The same could occur in Finland. Finnish is unlikely to die out, but to have a similar status to Sami and Roma languages? Perhaps.

[Cadwgan]

I'm glad to hear the confidence in responses of Finnish not being in any danger. Attempts to force universal languages on various unique cultures has been tried all through history in the name of "conventialism", and has been nothing but tradgedy. I was just curious to see if there was any recognized concern for Finnish, being a unique language with a humble amount of speakers compared to other European languages. A thing that irritates me is that the international language councils consider a language to be endangered if it has few or no monolingual speakers.

With the other expiration dates we have been given, such as European civilization as we know it being dissolved by the end of this century, blond hair being wiped out within 200 years, and all indo-European races becoming extinct within 500 years, at what point do we all loose our languages?

Dusty Bin, I don't know where you get you're info on Cymraeg, (hopefully not Wilkipedia ) but Welsh is very much alive and healthy, and actively spoken as a first language in communities in 5 continents. The number is closer to a 850,000 now. Wales is almost completely bilingual, with any preference between English and Welsh being righfully given to Welsh. There are just as many forms of media and education facilities in Welsh, if not more, than English. I was raised in Gwynedd county, and one could stay there for months without hearing anything in English. And the vast majority of Welsh speakers do so as a first language. (oh $hit I did it again....)

***Note to Sammy*** My above Welsh-boasting here was done only in self defense!

Back to the topic, doesn't certain current social patterns raise some alarms? Finns leaving Finland, non-Finnish speakers moving in to replace them, the EU free-move nightmare, and with Finland being a world leader in IT and comminications, but the rest of the world doesn't know what the hell you're saying in Finnish, and with Turkey joining the EU as they seem to really have a hard-on for Finland.... It just seems to me that with Finns having such a strong cultural identity, there must be at least SOME concern for the distant future...

In my personal opinion, a Europe exclusivley speaking English, French and German in a few decades seems sadly very possible. I hope I'm proven wrong!

[haahatus]

Nothing is the same after 500 years. Not the Swedish language. There need not be any outside influences everything changes , everything still changes somehow. Spanish of 1400 is not the Spanish of today and not Icelandic of 1400 is not modern icelandic. As so no language is constant. But modern Spanish and Icelandic are succssors of what was before. There have been some influences that have changed or influenced those languages , but they are still distinct succesors of those old languages.

Finnish language will and is being influenced by foreign languages .The question will Finnish be overtaken by something new.

Samppa says english as a international language is a passing phenomen. yes it propably is. So was latin but that did not stop romance languages being spoken even today.

I am not so positive as the other people in this thread. I have done things here all day, altough have checked maybe too often Maybe I think further to the future. This isn't about my lifetime or the lifetimes of the children who read and write on this board today. A longer than one human timespan is what this is all about. DustyB said 50 years. I talk about further into the future. Maybe it isn't english but something else , who knows

I believe finnish as a llanguage, people and culture will end in the garbage dump of history like Thracians , gauls to some extent. Some influences will remain. Every decline is a gradual process. Before the end the language will be marginalized more and more. Where the last possible step is an extinct language.

There is no such risk.
in 1930ties there was some 3-4 million people speaking Finnish.
Now it is almost the double.
The Swedish language was 100 years ago much more important in Finland that it is today.
English is not a threat, just a communication 'central' between the countries of the world. Wink

I disagree with this. Considering the total speakers of finnish at the moment or 80 years ago is not a good pointer. The finnishness of the speakers is also important. English is not just an international language it is a carrier of culture. Now I don't think most of it doesen't come from one country like some people do. But it is still a carrier of culture. The market also causes this. Finland as a market is small. The bigger countries are big markets so generally is importing culture cheaper than producing it locally here. Increasingly food for Finland is produced outside of the country. So local farmers are dreadhing. The same way as food production is brought from outside so is culture. Price struggle doesen't care about Finnish language, or preserving anything really. This works against the existence of finnish all the time. Of course there is a prequisite Finnish people are open to these influences. A small country produces less good entertainement than a big one . In practice Finland as a small country is guided by destine to be more international than a big country.

Because programs in Finland are not dubbed people learn some of the foreign languages. This works even with dubbed programs , example slight spread of halloween. Teletubbies is interesting because it is a format which can be easily exported easily almost everywhere around the world. No translators needed. So Finns are being influenced by english language culture. Another point is science and computers. English has been getting a monopoly there. This adds to this

There are people like me who have grown up with english. As is apparent on the board my english isn't the best , altough I see it my self so I have lax controls of the english produced by me. So I've grown up with bad english , probably more than the average person of my age in Finland even though I have no relation to any english language people at all. It's the nerdyness. At the moment I find most people are very far away of beginning to use english. I don't think in english, but the language is still inside my head.

I can foresee a time when Finnish may well be still used and spoken, but English becomes the first choice language, rather than the second, among educated people.

Maybe this is possible. This kind of situation was in Estonia in the middle ages when the city population was more or less germanized. All these these things have happened before. Maybe when they work with english more than on average and maybe get married to foreigners more often( where their common language is english) ? shock:

It is interesting to see who can keep the monopoly of deciding what is good english in the future btw If Finnish people started to use english in their everyday life , it would propably not be anything that the native english speakers would think as being good english. Finglish language?

It's small languages without their own nation to protect them one should worry about.

Now my favorute thema immigration comes here. If Finland would take really really HUGE amounts of immigrants from countries who speak atleast basic english. English would start to take place because running a country where people don't understand eachother is a bad idea. If there are too many immigrants will it result in too many of them never learning finnish? If english would be used as a replacement say goodbye to the finnish language :

[Rosamunda]

Teaching Finnish as a foreign language (FFL) is a very new thing which could, IMO, explain why so many of us have experienced problems in learning the language. It is NOT an inherently difficult language. It is in fact extremely simple (phonetically speaking) and even the grammar is quite "logical" with relatively few exceptions. As teaching methods and materials improve it will become easier for foreigners to learn the language. I believe it is only VERY recently that any courses have been made available to train FFL teachers. The coursebooks and grammar books resemble the kind of things we were using to teach ESL maybe 30 or 40 years ago. The choice is very limited and ALL (?) are based on learning language through grammar rather than a lexical approach. I'm convinced that with the right methods Finnish could be taught more effectively.

What is most important is that immigrant people, especially children, be given the opportunity to use their Finnish language on a regular basis. Which means they must have jobs and other activities where they mix with Finns. It's easier for young kids who mix all day at school. This could be one of the reasons why it is UNUSUAL to find immigrant children in immersion schools (English/Finnish). Most schools prefer to put non-Finnish speaking children into immigrant (intensive Finnish) courses rather than allow them to improve their English. In fact the entrance tests to immersion schools are always in Finnish.

[Rosamunda]

And with regards to the future of English there are many books on the subject some of them recent bestsellers (Crystal: The Stories of ENglish, McCrum et al : The Story of English, Bragg: The Adventure of English, and I think I also have one by Bill Bryson).

One idea is that as English becomes more widely spoken it will "break up" into many sub-languages and eventually these will evolve into quite independent languages. So, it could be argued that Finnish is less under threat than the Queen's English.

[sammy]

If english would be used as a replacement say goodbye to the finnish language :

Yes, IF english would be given the status of an official/national language in Finland. This is not likely to happen, at least not as long as Finland exists as an independent nation I don't mean to sound nationalistic in the wrong way, but Finnish as a language is something that only disappears when the Finns disappear. (This of course is perfectly possible, but not really foreseeable. The same kind of really long-term speculation can be used to justify the assumption that at some future point of time, English is not the native language on the British isles. Maybe mandarin Chinese? )

Of course, the language itself changes. No language in the world is static. Culture and language, however, are interwoven only to an extent. To suppose that just the fact that "foreign" culture is imported to Finland would somehow be gnawing away the position of Finnish as a national language is as absurd as to insist that, what with all the cultural influences among the so-called educated people (for example, listening to operas sung in Italian or German) they would stop thinking and speaking in Finnish, their native tongue. Or, to give another example, take the continuous flow of English-language pop music to Finland since the late 50's. The English language skills have developed greatly, partly as a reason for this influence and of course partly because of the school teaching - but surprise, Finns still have Finnish (or Swedish) as their native language

As one poster commented above, it is only those languages that do not have a clearly independent nation to sustain them are generally in danger of being extinct.

English has become accpeted as a normal language in Finland. There is plenty of advertsing in English (a good sign of how far the language has already become integrated), English is becoming a standard in official documents, many firms use English as their business language for everything except client facing work.

I'm afraid you're again looking at the situation from, shall we say, English rose-tinted glasses There are some adverts in English, but of course this has nothing to do with English becoming "integrated". Just a marketing gimmick, as in many other countries too.

And surely, English is not becoming "standard" in official documents or the working life? (if this were so, why are so many "foreigners" complaining that it is difficult to find a job in Finland? ) I'd say this is very rare indeed - only related to some big companies like Nokia. And even if this tendency were to increase, there is a limit to which it can go (it makes no sense at all to extend the use of English beyond e.g. international business contacts - and the society and its infrastructure remains outside this) - so it would not make any difference to be honest. Here, again, you maybe are confusing the concepts of "language skill (ie. working language)" and "native language".

Anyway, this is an interesting topic On a very wide time-scale, and in a very broad cosmic sense, it does not of course matter one whit whether Finnish as a language (or Finland as a nation) survives. Maybe not. But until that day, p*rrrkele will strongly prevail at these latitudes

[sammy]

Back to the topic, doesn't certain current social patterns raise some alarms? --- with Finland being a world leader in IT and comminications, but the rest of the world doesn't know what the hell you're saying in Finnish ---

Well, actually it doesn't matter if they do not understand what we're saying in Finnish, because we can make business with English easily enough. This however will not make English our native language In fact, it is very, very hard indeed to imagine even that kind of situation in which Finland would be an officially bilingual country with a "choice" between Finnish/English. The historical background just simply is not there (as opposed to Swedish) and is quite unlikely to form, what with Finland already being established as, well, a nation with it's own language.

As said, the Finnish-is-doomed scenarios discussed in this thread are not IMPOSSIBLE but as long as Finland is there as a nation, they are, well, bloody unlikely

(Again, I'm only using the word "nation" here to simply refer to the way human societies are arranged on a large scale, without any nationalistic undertones. The term nation as I'm using it in this discussion refers to the infrasrtucture - education, politics, art and culture, and so on. Finland as a country and Finnish as a language are just "one among many others", neither more nor less valuable than any other as such.)

[Hank W.]

Back to the topic, doesn't certain current social patterns raise some alarms? Finns leaving Finland, non-Finnish speakers moving in to replace them, the EU free-move nightmare,

Err... Finns move because theres no jobs or no money in the jobs. Immigrants who move in for the "grunt" jobs nead to speak or they won't get a job. And what else is there to do - count the trees?

[sinikettu]

Late into this thread..but I am not a lingusitic expert but facts are:

1: Many Finns continue to emigrate chasing the jobs.

2: Those Finns who remain are moving closer to the cities (Helsinki/Oulu etc.) because: Jobs in the Forrest (counting trees) are rare.

3: English is more common as a second language in the cities, it also demanded in more city jobs as more tourist/visitors and immigrants appear. (Stockmanns/Sokos both require English now and I see more often on job requests for shop jobs.)

4: The 1945-1950 babies boomers are now approaching retirement, in next 10 years the number of working poulation of Finns will crash dive...Finns have not been breeding enough.

5: The government know about 4 above, hence the drive/need for more immigrants to keep the country running.

6: The main cause quoted for poor imigration figures of needed labour force is the Finnish language. (second are the taxes, third the weather.)

Non niin..
IMO Finnish will not die as a language but English will make very rapid in roads into every day conversation.

[sammy]

And what else is there to do - count the trees?

Don't worry, they are sure to find good-paying jobs in arranging home removal services for the hordes of non-Finnish-speaking ex-Finns that wish to move away from the old home country "forrests" as soon as possible...

(Just waiting for the day when the Finnish parliament sees the light and switches its working language into English )

[sammy]

(Stockmanns/Sokos both require English now and I see more often on job requests for shop jobs.)

Yeees, but what you're talking about here is language SKILLS, not "removal of mother tongue, replaced by English" These two things -having a mother tongue (Finnish) and possessing foreign language skills, however good (in e.g. English)- are quite separate from each other

How easy would it be, for example, to find a job at Sokos/Stockmann without Finnish/Swedish skills? The social "problems" you mentioned would need to become severe indeed, before the position of the Finnish language would be seriously threatened, even in the densely populated city areas. Possible? Perhaps, yes. Likely? Naah

[EP]

If there are too many immigrants will it result in too many of them never learning finnish? If english would be used as a replacement say goodbye to the finnish language

Just last week I was walking behind a group of teen-age boys, half of them Somalian, half Vietnamese origin. Their language of communication was Finnish, and it seemed effortless and there wasn´t even any accent. It was just like listening to Finnish teen-agers.

There are 12 000 books published yearly in Finnish. Some of those have this international, light side best-seller quality, like the ones with "international conspiracy" plot or historical novels with a bit of excitement, love and some sexy parts. Why don´t these writers then write in English? They would have a far wider audience.

[sammy]

There are 12 000 books published yearly in Finnish. Some of those have this international, light side best-seller quality, like the ones with "international conspiracy" plot or historical novels with a bit of excitement, love and some sexy parts. Why don´t these writers then write in English? They would have a far wider audience.

Hmm Why on earth did Marcel Proust write about "le temps perdu" instead of "times past"? People who have a certain mother tongue and have literary ambitions usually make them true by writing in the said language That is the IDEA of having a mother tongue; to belong to a certain culture, and to share things within that culture. It is -to a large extent- also a question of self-definition.

Maybe these writers LOVE writing in their native language? A strange idea, perhaps

And besides, this state of affairs, in addition to being perfectly natural, actually also provides jobs for some other people.

Translators, you see?

[sammy]

Just last week I was walking behind a group of teen-age boys, half of them Somalian, half Vietnamese origin. Their language of communication was Finnish, and it seemed effortless and there wasn´t even any accent. It was just like listening to Finnish teen-agers.

Well, you were walking behind some Finnish teenagers. They live here? Possibly even citizens? If you ask me, they are Finns