I recently noticed that two members of Finnish band “Nightwish” have surnames that end with “-ainen”: Keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen and drummer Jukka Nevalainen. The director of their most recent music video also has a name that ends with “-ainen”. And the guitarist’s surname comes close: Vuorinen.
Would I be completely off-base if I surmised that “-ainen” is the Finnish equivalent to “-son” or “-sen” in other languages? Their current lead singer is from the Netherlands (Jansen) and their previous singer’s surname was “Olzen” (almost Olson). Their original singer’s surname was “Turunen”
Apparently it is not patronymic. According to this site, “Patronymic names in Finnish end with -poika (son) or -tytär (daughter).”
Elsewhere the same site rather unhelpfully mentions, “Family surnames have certain types of endings: -nen or -ainen/-äinen. For example, Huuskonen and Liimatainen are family surnames.” Doesn’t really say what the meaning of those endings is.
(I already knew that the band’s keyboardist/songwriter/composer’s name, “Tuomas” was the Finnish version of “Thomas”.)
I’m also curious about the one Finnish surname in the band that doesn’t fit the pattern: The bass player, Marco Hietala. I checked Wikipedia for “Hietala” (why not, that’s how I found out what my own surname actually means: I grew up thinking that “Osborne” was a nice English name referring to where some ancestor was born, but found out that the name comes from the Old Norse “Asbjørn” [pronounced: OOS-bern], and means “god bear”, and goes a long way in explaining how “Osborne” is also a well-known surname in Spain, to the point that the name is attached to an advertising campaign in Spain that is on par with “Burma Shave”), but all I got was “It’s a Finnish surname. Here are some famous people with that name.”)
According to this discussion I found on wordreference.com, -nen and -ainen are equivalent, and may be a diminutive or indicate a person from a given place or of a given sort.
Hietala might be from hieta, “fine sand,” plus the “farm name” suffix -la.
Just to confuse things a bit more -Suomalainien = Finnish,
Ruotsalainen = Swedish.
Suomi = Finland, Ruotsi = Sweden.
Also: “Ruotsalainen is a Finnish surname (literally meaning “a Swede”, but as a name originally referring to the adherents of Lutheran Christianity in Karelia). It may refer to:”
Followed by a list of Finnish people.
Surnames in Finland are of a recent, taxation-based origin. Most lines of evidence point to them being gradually adopted only from the 16th century onwards. And ordinary country folk didn’t use surnames until the 1800’s. The -nen suffix is originally an eastern Finnish one, and, as pointed out, originally a (positive) diminutive, but already in the 16th century records used interchangeably with the -son / -poika-suffixes. The -la-suffix as in ‘Hietala’ is a western Finnish one, and denotes the farm where the family was originally from. Hietala would be a farm on sandy soil.
In eastern Finland, the swidden-based economy of the 1800’s was mobile and the surnames followed the people as in today, whereas in Western Finland the fixed field-based economy meant that for taxation purposes, the farm mattered, not the people living in it. So, people got the name of the farm, no matter their true relations (of course most people living on the same farm would be related, nevertheless).
Plenty of Finnish surnames were made up of whole cloth only some 100 - 150 years ago. No rhyme or reason there, apart from fashion.
Of course, today the surnames have traveled all over, and a person’s surname most often tells nothing of where she or her family is from, in any meaningful sense.
Uhm, Spain got the Osborne from England. I mean, it’s cool that it got there from Scandinavia and all, but that’s got nothing to do with the wineries.