In spite of not being able to so much as say “hello” or count to three in Finnish, I can reliably recognize its written form. I don’t know what it is I see that I can immediately say, “yup, that’s Finnish.”
I can distinguish Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well. With those, I know why I recognize it as whatever language. If it looks Chinese but doesn’t have Japanese kana, I know that’s Chinese. Korean Hangul characters are even more distinctive. I can say what language it is and why.
Finnish, on the other hand, I know it when I see it. I couldn’t tell you why. Any insight?
Additional letters: Finnish employs the Latin alphabet but includes additional characters: ä, ö, and å.
Finnish often doubles vowels and consonants: maa (land), kissa (cat).
You might recognize certain Suffixes and Endings, such as words ending in -nen (common in surnames and adjectives, e.g., Virtanen, suomalainen), -ssa/-ssä (in), -lla/-llä (on), -sta/-stä (from), etc.
Finnish forms long compound words, e.g., lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas
You might recognize Common Words and Phrases such as
ja (and), on (is), ei (no/not), mutta (but), minä (I), sinä (you)
Days of the week: maanantai (Monday), tiistai (Tuesday), etc.
Probably the same way I’ve been able to recognize languages since I was a kid: I’m not sure!
They do have to be in our alphabet, however. I cannot, for instance, distinguish Russian from Ukrainian, although I can tell them from, for instance, Georgian, because they don’t have the same alphabet.
@PastTense nailed it, although I don’t think that Finnish uses å.
Obviously, the writing system can already tell you a lot.
Then, each language has a finite number of phonemes, so just looking at the letters and diacritcs gives you some important information. For instance the only language that I know that uses ë extensively is Albanian (there may be others, but it’s a start).
Phonotactic constraints are highly language-specific. For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like /rv/ do not occur. Similarly, the clusters /kn/ and /ɡn/ are not permitted at the beginning of a word in Modern English but are permitted in German and were permitted in Old and Middle English.[2] In contrast, in some Slavic languages /l/ and /r/ are used alongside vowels as syllable nuclei.
In English, you cannot have /ŋ/ (ng) at the beginning of a word, nor the /h/ sound at the end. Indonesian does not have those restrictions.
Similarly, some languages do not allow consonants at the end of a syllable, others can have complex clusters pretty much anywhere.
Even when you do not speak a particular language, you can pick up on those clues subconsciously once you encounter it, and use them to recognize its “signature”, or “profile” subsequently.
According to Wikipedia, it does, but only in Swedish names.
In addition to what others have said, there’s also the fact that there are letters that Finnish only uses in loanwords and not even always in those: B, C, F, W, X, and Z. Q is only used in foreign proper names and G only appears following N. So the absense of those letters may also be a clue.
For me what gives it away is that Finnish is a language that uses the Roman alphabet and has a lot of double-consonants in the middle of words, but it’s not German, Italian, or Romanized Japanese.
Or another shorthand, Finnish is a European language that inexplicably reads a lot like Romanized Japanese, but clearly isn’t Japanese at all. I think at one point someone tried to shoehorn Finnish and Japanese into a theorized “Ural-Altaic” language family, but that didn’t work out, the similarities are just coincidence AFAIK.
I can’t speak any foreign language except Spanish poorly, but I can recognize perhaps twenty written languages, including the scripts of completely foreign to me languages such as Urdu and Korean. I couldn’t tell you how, specifically. Patterns of sounds, patterns of marks. Our brains are extremely skilled at recognizing patterns.
I mean, Korean is nothing like the other two. It’s based on an alphabetic syllabary, so is quite structured and has a limited amount of characters arranged a certain way.
Finnish is a lot of umlauts, especially over "a"s to me, and even doubled umlauted letters like “ää”, and just doubled letters in general. You can spot Hungarian in a pinch, too. It doesn’t look quite like Finnish, though it is similar in its long words, abundance of vowels, but it doesn’t have the ä. Plus if you see long umlauts, like ő and ű, you’re 100% in Hungarian. For Estonian, if you see something that looks like Finnish but has this vowel: õ, you’re in Estonian. Also, if you spot the yes/no question particle kas, that’s Estonian.
Just an anecdotal aside, if I may. I’m okay with languages, but Finnish is a mystery. I knew a Finnish woman who was married to an American Foreign Service officer. She worked parttime receiving supplies, etc. The one time I saw her doing that, she was talking to the workers in French and to herself in Finnish. The French I could understand, but the Finnish may as well have been Plutonian.
Hungarian often has that same effect on people. While I’ve never become truly fluent in Hungarian , it was always disconcerting to me to hear Finnish because it has some of the same rhythms and cadences Hungarian has. Every time I heard it, it sounded like Hungarian with a completely different vocabulary to me.
Yeah, I spent some time in Budapest doing a renovation project at the U.S. embassy. Without cognates, Slavic and Asian languages have to be learned by rote memorization, at least for native English speakers.