A recent Associated Press article on the suicide bombing in that Helsinki area mall called Finland a “Nordic” country. How legit is this? Consulting the dictionary, Nordic seems to denote the Scandanavian ancestry. But isn’t it true that most Finns aren’t ethnically or culturally Scandavian? I mean, the Finns have an entirely different language and whatnot…so is Nordic still applicable. Shouldn’t it have been the “Finnic-Ugric” nation?
Finland was actually a part of Sweden from the mid-fourteenth century until 1809. In 1809, it was annexed and became a Grand Duchy of Russia.
Culturally, I’d put Finland much closer to other Scandinavian countries. Swedes make up the second largest cultural group, and Swedish (along with Finnish) is an official language of Finland.
Ethnically, I think they’re closest to the Hungarians. Linguistically, too.
Here’s a nice language link on the Finno-Ugric tongues.
http://eunuch.ddg.com/LIS/InfoDesignF97/paivir/finnish/finnugr.html
As I understand it, “Scandinavian” refers to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and sometimes Iceland. “Nordic” (meaning “northern”) refers to all these countries and Finland as well. I think this is the way the terms are used in those countries, but some English dictionaries consider the two terms to be synonymous. The SOED agrees with the definition I gave, which I first came across in a book by William Shirer.
Swedish, a Scandinavian language, is one of the official languages of Finland, but I don’t think that suffices to make Finland a Scandinavian country. Only abou 6% of the population is made up of native speakers of Swedish.
This page goes into much more detail, complete with competing dictionary entries; Nordic FAQ - 2 of 7 - NORDEN
MY wife is a Swede, and says that Finns are very different to the rest of the Scandanavians, primarily because of the language. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians can understand each other, and can read Islandic. Finnish, as has been pointed out, is similar to Hungarian.
Scandinavia = The Scandinavian peninsula containing Norway and Sweden
The Scandinavian Countries = Norway, Sweden and Denmark
The Nordic Countries = Norway, Sweden Denmark, Finland and Iceland (i.e. The countries making up the Nordic Council).
You could say that in the same way that you could say that Swedish is similar to Greek. In other words, they are related but mutually incomprehensive. The language(s) closest related to Finnish is Estonian and Meänkieli (the variant of Finnish spoken in Sweden).
An anthropological study a few years ago, examining mitochondrial DNA in several Nordic ethnic groups, resulted in the surprising discovery that Finns are ethnically more closely related to the Scandinavian groups than to other Finno-Ugric speakers! The study was supposed to help shed some light on the mystery of where the Sami (who you may know as the “Lapps”) came from. Instead, it uncovered a new mystery, namely how the Finns on the one hand and the Norwegians and Swedes on the other ended up speaking unrelated languages…
The five Nordic countries not only shared elements of their history and culture in the past, but have political and cultural links now through the Nordic Council and other organizations right now. Regardless of who is related to whom, the countries are linked. From where I’m sitting, it feels very much like the attack in suburban Helsinki happened “in our backyard”. 
Incidentally, I strongly disagree that most Scandinavians can read Icelandic. Icelandic and Faroese differ so strongly from the “mainland” Scandinavian languages that most Norwegians, Danes and Swedes would be lucky to recognize a few roots and guess at the meaning of a sign or a short sentence.
It was anecdotal, I confess. Perhaps its just my wife and my wife’s family then.
Singing:
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be –
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
Finland’s got it all.
If you’ve enjoyed hearing this song and would like to know more about Finland, stop by and see Mr. (I forget the name now) and his charming wife Edna. If you’re really fortunate, perhaps they will show you their unrivaled collection of Scandinavian credit cards.
Maybe I like Monty P. a little too much?
RR
I agree that Icelandic is difficult to understand but it is possible for Scandinavians to read Faroese.
Well, the Finns and the Hungarians both speak FInno-Ugric languages, but Finnish is much closer to Estonian than it is to Hungarian. In fact, they’re mutually intelligle with practice (being the “Finnic” part of the Finno-Ugric group; HUngarian is of the Ugric half), which Finnish and Hungarian are not. When I was in Estonia, the Estonians said they could understand Finnish TV and radio without many problems; Helsinki is just a ferry ride away from Tallinn.
My Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language lists other members of the Finnic group as Karelian, with 100,000 speakers; Mordvin, with about 1 million speakers; Mari (Cheremis) and Udmurt, wiht about half a million each; and Komi (Zyryan), with about 400,000. There are also a few others with only a few thousand speakers at most, which seem to be dying. The above languages are mostly spoken around the former Soviet Union: some around the Bay of Riga, some in Karelia, and a bunch around the central Volga region and Siberia.
I’ve never seen a good theory for any population migrations that might explain how the Finnic half got separated from the Ugric half; geographically, it wouldn’t seem to make much sense (although there are some other Ugric languages also spoken around Siberia and the Russian Far North and the Ob River area. Anyone know how this could have happened? I’m willing to dig into my Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Federation (it’s sort of an endangered species list for minority groups in the RF) if anyone’s curious enough.
Mmmm…Stalin? That’s my best guess. Probably horribly wrong. I know he deported Chechens, Tartars, Volga Germans, and some others, though.
Nope, they’ve been there much longer than that - they’re considered indigenous peoples. AFAIK it’s a historical/linguistic phenomenon that isn’t well understood. I sat through an entire conference on the native peoples of Siberia (in Siberia) without hearing a single explanation. (That’s where the Red Book came from; it’s actually yellow, BTW).
If you want to read more about the peoples Stalin deported, do a search on my username and Chechen.
There is no geographical discontinuity of Uralic speakers in Russia. The Finnic and Ugric branches are contiguous in the northern Urals.
The Uralic peoples inhabited what is now Russia for thousands of years before the Slavs moved in.
The Permian group of the Finnic languages are spoken just to the west of the northern Urals; the Ob-Ugric branch just to the east of there. According to an ethno-linguistic map of the Soviet Union published in National Geographic (February 1976), the Permian Finnic language Komi and the Ob-Ugric language Khanty are contiguous.
The earliest location that the Hungarians have been traced to is the central Ural area now known as Bashkiria or Bashkortostan (now inhabited by a Turkic-speaking people). In the early Middle Ages, after the Magyars had lived on the steppes among Turks and then migrated to present-day Hungary, Bashkiria was still known as “Magna Hungaria.” In the 13th century, a Hungarian Dominican monk named Friar Julian heard of this and traveled there to investigate. He reported that he found people there still speaking a Magyar dialect. Unfortunately, right then the Mongols invaded, so his research was cut short, and no long-lost cousins of the Hungarians could be located there afterwards.
The nearest linguistic relatives of Hungarian are the Ob-Ugric languages Khanty and Mansi, spoken just east of the Permian Finnic region, in northwestern Asia (how often do you get a chance to say “northwestern Asia”?). To the east of there is the region of Samoyedic languages, the more distantly related branch of Uralic. Bordering the Samoyed regions on the east are the westernmost outposts of the Tungusic languages, an Altaic language group related to Turkic, Mongolian, and Korean. (Manchu was a Tungusic language, now perhaps extinct. See The Last Emperor for the dying gasps of the Manchu culture.) The Russian linguist S. M. Shirokogoroff found evidence for Ural-Altaic relationship by comparative study of Samoyedic and Tungusic (S. M. Shirokogoroff, Ethnological and Linguistical Aspects of the Ural-Altaic Hypothesis, Peking, 1931). The Siberian hero of the film Dersu Uzala was an Evenki (i.e., Tungus).
Much farther east from the Samoyed area, on the Arctic Ocean in the Sakha Republic, are the speakers of the Paleosiberian language Yukagir—now nearly extinct—which has been shown to be related to Uralic, making for a larger Uralic-Yukagir taxonomy. Even farther afield, there have been hypotheses linking Uralic to Eskimo-Aleut, but that’s a big stretch, and further evidence is needed.
On the other hand, there have been hypotheses relating Uralic to Indo-European in a larger language “macrofamily.” This is controversial, but one thing linguists agree on is that there were very early loanwords from Indo-European into Proto-Finno-Ugric, from the Iranian branch of Indo-European. For example the word for ‘hundred’ (Old Persian/Avestan sata, New Persian sad; Finnish sata, Estonian sada, Mordvin siado, Khanty-Mansi sat, Hungarian száz). The time depth of these loans is maybe 4,000 years before present. It seems Uralic and Indo-European speakers were in contact that long ago. Iranian was spoken in southern Russia, Finno-Ugric in central and northern Russia. There were also loanwords from Semitic into Proto-Indo-European way back then, but that’s another story…
**Jomo Mojo, ** is all your info from Shirokogoroff, or did you find other stuff on this phenomenon? I’d be interested to read more, but let’s just say that the odds of the Chicago Public Library having that particular tome are rather slim.
Eva Luna, the only thing I got from Shirokogoroff was the support for the Ural-Altaic hypothesis, based on a comparative study of Samoyedic and Tungusic. (I found his book in the Georgetown University library. Any book you need that can’t be found locally you can request through the modern miracle of interlibrary loan at your local public library.) The rest of the information is typed from memory of years of reading about these subjects, in a large number of sources. If you can scare up a copy of the February 1976 National Geographic map, Peoples of the Soviet Union, you’ll find a lot of information right there.
One other good cite I can offer is The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia edited by the Hungarian scholar Denis Sinor, which is more about Altaic peoples, but does have interesting information on the early history of some Uralic peoples too.
Right now I’m reading The Uralic Protolanguage: A Comprehensive Reconstruction by Gyula Décsy (Bloomington, Indiana: Eurolingua, 1990). In Chicago, the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago has tons of good resources. I visited there once.
Thanks for the cites; it’s heartening to see so many authored by folks affiliated with the Russian & East European Institute at Induana U., my alma mater!
I’ve done interlibrary loan before, but one generally only gets the book for a couple of weeks with no renewals available, which isn’t always enough for me. And yeah, I’d love to be able to hang out at Regenstein, but one needs to be a currently enrolled student, preferably at U. of C., in order to get into the building these days. Even when I was still enrolled in grad school and wanted to photocopy stuff in the stacks there, they gave me a very hard time and made me jump through all sorts of hoops. Non-students theoretically aren’t allowed in at all.
Eva Luna, I was allowed into Regenstein only once, for a librarians’ conference held there … but I made sure to spend as many hours browsing the stacks as I could get away with…
Indiana University at Bloomington has the Center for Ural-Altaic Studies, so it’s definitely the place to be if you like this sort of thing.
Here is a good book I should have cited before, that is of interest to this whole thread:
Collinder, Björn. An Introduction to the Altaic Languages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).
From the Introduction, “The Uralic Peoples and Languages”, p. 7-8…
And as to the genetic difference between Finns and Lapps, here’s something from p. 16.
From p. 28-29, a discussion of the place of origin, and migrations of the Uralic peoples, which has been asked about in this thread…