The eastern dialect of Finnish - a new scientific language
One of the stories in recent news that amazed me more than the rest is the linguistic treatise published by the young scholar Jani Koskinen – or ‘Koskiin’, as he himself spells it on the cover of his work – in the Eastern Finnish dialect.
People in this country are concerned about how English is holding sway over Finnish in science, because many economists and engineers are convinced that English is the correct language of science and internationalisation. Thus, Koskinen is very much sailing against the wind and questioning both English and standard Finnish with his revolutionary gesture.
Koskinen’s treatise is about how Sami, the old language of Lapland in northern Finland, has influenced Old Scandinavian. Sami is related to Finnish but only distantly: a Finn can’t understand anything from a discourse in Sami, with the exception of recent Finnish loanwords.
Actually, as regards intelligibility, Sami is not one single language either. Three out of four Sami speak a language known as Northern Sami, but in addition to that there are two other written standards used by Sami in Finland. One is Skolt Sami, spoken by those Sami who have had contact with Russians long ago, so that they have got both their Christian religion and a lot of borrowed words from there. But then there is also Inari Sami, the language of the ‘forest Sami’, who have never been nomads or reindeer herders. Most Forest Sami took to Finnish a long time ago, and their descendants now speak Finnish and see themselves as Finns. The old language is spoken by 300 people around Lake Inari in northern Finland.
Every language has its dialects, and Finnish is no exception. The most important dialectal difference in Finnish is the one between eastern and western Finnish. The written language was based, in the beginning, on western dialects, but in the 19th century intellectuals were interested in romantic nationalism, and accordingly they understood the importance of folklore for literature. Thus, Elias Lönnrot went to the east to look for poetry and stories, and he came to edit the Kalevala, the mythological epic of Finland. Moreover, he published Kanteletar, a collection of lyric poetry from the common people. The eastern language of these writings deeply influenced the kind of Finnish that was being written and read, and consequently the Finnish as written today is an equal fusion of eastern and western dialects.
Koskinen says that dialects have been marginalised in contemporary Finnish life. Books are printed in dialect, but these are mostly humorous works. He wanted to show that it is possible to use regional dialects or minority languages in scientific and serious contexts.
The lesson to be learned is that even such languages have no intrinsic fault making them impossible to use in learned treatises. If you know the language, you can express anything in it, and that’s the end of it.
Panu Höglund is an Irish speaker from Finland currently translating a number of books from English into Irish.
