# Another question for the board's overworked linguists: How is it that I can recognize written Finnish? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 25, 2025, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101 "2025-06-25T02:47:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/21 "2025-06-25T17:08:02Z")
You’ll find some cognates in Slavic languages, but not like with Germanic or Latinate languages, of course. For an English speaker, you might find 5-ish% of words recognizable. Like (using Polish): restauracja, edukacja, musyka, komputer. You might also know apteka (pharmacy) or dach (roof, from German) and some other words if you have a little French and German under your belt. Meanwhile, in Hungarian, we have, for those words: étterem, oktatás, zene, számítógép, gyógyszertár, tető. That language is a doozy. There are cognates few and far between, but essentially you’re starting from scratch. The Slavic languages are at least Indo-European, so there’s some skeletal similarity and familiarality with them in a way Finnish and Hungarian lack. ---
**Author:** ![Marvin\_the\_Martian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/marvin_the_martian/32/2898_2.png) [@Marvin\_the\_Martian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marvin_the_Martian)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/22 "2025-06-25T17:40:08Z")
> [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](#): > > “The Finnish language looks like someone threw some vowels on a plate and shook it real hard.” - Michael D. C. Drout Yup, really long words with too many vowels. At some point the ancestral Finns raided Wales and stole all their vowels, just leaving them with a crapton of Ys. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/23 "2025-06-25T18:48:18Z")
I also spent some time in the USSR, but all I took away from there was CTON (stop), Pectopah (restaurant), da and nyet. Picked up a bit of Polish, the usual please/thankyou/beer/good morning words. Anyway, sorry for the hijack. I’ll go away now. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/24 "2025-06-25T19:44:12Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > 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. These comparisons are always interesting to me. I have heard Thai and Vietnamese people say similar things, that it’s a really uncanny feeling that the sounds and cadences are the same, they _should_ understand the other language, but cannot. This is how I feel when I hear someone speaking Scots. But Scots and English are basically sister languages, whereas Thai and Vietnamese aren’t really related at all except for a few borrowed words. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/25 "2025-06-25T19:51:28Z")
Has circles = Korean Complex = Chinese. I’m not sure I can 100% say Simplified vs. Traditional Mix of complex and either swoopy or sharp = Japanese Has æ ø = Norwegian or Danish. Unless you happen to run into Faroese… Has þ ð = Icelandic. Or you’re talking to an ancient Anglo-Saxon. Swedish and Finnish both have å ä ö but are clearly different. I doubt I can do Estonian except say the odds are more in Finnish’s favor. Has ő ű - Hungarian ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/26 "2025-06-25T21:36:24Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > This is how I feel when I hear someone speaking Scots. I’ve occasionally had to interpret Scots for Anglo companions. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/27 "2025-06-25T22:07:01Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > 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. Those doubled consonants (especially kk) are what does it for me. Can you tell Finnish from Estonian (they are supposedly mutually intelligible)? Turkish is said to be in the same language group, but it looks totally different–and equally characteristic. There was a Finnish curling player named Markku Uusipaavalniemi. He said that even in Finland he was generally referred to as M15. He had a brother whose first name was Uusi. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/28 "2025-06-25T22:29:46Z")
Likewise, I have read that Maltese is basically Arabic with a different alphabet. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/29 "2025-06-25T23:21:35Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Can you tell Finnish from Estonian (they are supposedly mutually intelligible)? Me? Probably not, I’m not aware that I’ve ever come across Estonian, except we did just get this tip in this thread: > [@pulykamell](#): > > 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. So I don’t think I’ve ever seen Estonian, but if I do, now I’ll know. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/30 "2025-06-25T23:25:18Z")
That’s the most distinctive. Looking at the two alphabets I also see that Estonian has a Ü that Finnish lacks, and Finnish has an Å that Estonian doesn’t have. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/31 "2025-06-25T23:34:27Z")
I have the same issue when I see printed Dutch. I studied German some decades ago, and while I have forgotten a lot, I remember enough that written German looks “right” to me, and Dutch looks “Germanish - but wrong.” ---
**Author:** ![Xocomil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xocomil/32/14927_2.png) [@Xocomil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xocomil)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/32 "2025-06-26T00:31:58Z")
> [@PastTense](#): > > You might recognize Common Words and Phrases You flatter me. The only Finnish word I know is “suomi.” I see a couple of false friends from German in there, though. “Ja” and “mutta” very much do not mean what I would figure from German. > [@MrDibble](#): > > You think you’ll be able to tell it from Estonian? What @pulykamell and a few others said: õ = Estonian; a surfeit of acute accents = Hungarian. Finnish, by contrast, is quite judicious in its use of diacritics. It’s rather Zen-like. > [@pulykamell](#): > > 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. Hangul, despite being alphabetic, is arranged into single-syllable characters to, AFAIK, resemble Chinese logograms. Before I was familiar with it, I could only distinguish it from Chinese or Japanese the same way @thelurkinghorror did: circles and lots of them. It’s interesting that there seem to be areas where languages sound like each other regardless of their language families. Mongolian sounds really Slavic to me and, oddly, some Alaskan indigenous languages sound European somehow. I think German might sound a lot more like English than I can perceive myself as an English-speaker, being sister languages and all. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/33 "2025-06-26T00:41:51Z")
Obviously you can recognize written Finnish because it says “The End”, and there’s no more writing on the pages after that. > [@pulykamell](#): > > You can spot Hungarian in a pinch, too. Hungarian’s easy, because it sounds like Klingon. And no, that’s not a joke: Hungarian is closer to Klingon than it is to any Earthly language. > [@Xocomil](#): > > It’s interesting that there seem to be areas where languages sound like each other regardless of their language families. The native Israelis I’ve met have had accents that sounded to me almost like Irish. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 2:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/34 "2025-06-26T02:05:55Z")
> [@Xocomil](#): > > I think German might sound a lot more like English than I can perceive myself as an English-speaker, being sister languages and all. The one that would sometimes get me is Dutch. Every so often, if I was half-paying attention, I could swear bits of Dutch sound like English or English being spoken backwards or something. I don’t get the same effect from German, just Dutch. It’s as if I’m listening to “Prisencólinensináinciúsol” (the nonsense English song by Adriano Celentano. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s worth looking up on YouTube.) It’s like just at the edge of making sense, but it doesn’t ever get there. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/35 "2025-06-26T02:26:56Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > It’s as if I’m listening to “Prisencólinensináinciúsol” (the nonsense English song by Adriano Celentano. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s worth looking up on YouTube.) As is this heartbreaking short film: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/Vt4Dfa4fOEY/maxresdefault.jpg "How English sounds to non-English speakers") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY) ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/36 "2025-06-26T02:33:57Z")
Ah, I haven’t seen that one in ages and had completely forgotten about it. Yeah, that conveys how Dutch comes across to me, though with a stronger American accent. ---
**Author:** ![Moonrise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moonrise/32/14764_2.png) [@Moonrise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moonrise)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/37 "2025-06-26T07:37:23Z")
> [@Xocomil](#): > > oddly, some Alaskan indigenous languages sound European somehow. That’s interesting. Around 1999, I went to an exhibition on the Inuit peoples with a Finnish friend. There were a few sentences written in one of the Inuit languages that were projected on a wall. She stopped in front of one and said “This is weird. It really looks like Finnish, but I don’t understand a single word.” I’ve just found this sample dialogue on Wikipedia, and indeed there’s some similarity in syllable structure. _Piitaup paliisi takuvauk?_ _Aakka, paliisinik Piita takujuq._ ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 7:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/38 "2025-06-26T07:42:08Z")
> [@Xocomil](#): > > It’s interesting that there seem to be areas where languages sound like each other regardless of their language families. To me, Portuguese sounds like Russians speaking Spanish. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 7:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/39 "2025-06-26T07:54:43Z")
Yes! I was just about to write pretty much the same thing — that Portuguese sounds almost like Russian crossed with a Romance language. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2025, 8:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101/40 "2025-06-26T08:59:24Z")
I think it’s the combo of frequent /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ sounds, and palatalized consonants that does it for many people. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-question-for-the-boards-overworked-linguists-how-is-it-that-i-can-recognize-written-finnish/1020101.md?page=3)