I came here to post that…
dougie_monty, in post no. 19 you quoted Tom Burman as saying:
In my experience of Finnish people, this is not correct. They do not consider Finland part of Scandinavia.
Because if there’s one thing the Swiss are known for, it’s terrible language skills. 
Or maybe they have a 5th official language now, because why not?
Sweden and Denmark don’t, but Norway does share a border with Russia.
As a Finn: in a way it is wrong, Scandinavia is actually a name of a mountain range and that doesn’t extend here as there’s not a single mountain in Finland. Usually we prefer Nordic country, a part of Fennoscandia. But no-one cares when the context tells if you include Finland.
Finland is ‘Suomi’, Finnish ( language ) is ‘suomi’ ( note the small s ), Finnish ( person ) is ‘suomalainen’.
‘I don’t speak Finnish language’ would be ‘En puhu suomea’ ( sic, not ‘suomia’, that’s a different word meaning ‘to lash’ )
Swedish and other languages are totally unintelligible. And Estonian is just annoying 'cause just when one thinks he’s getting a grasp of what the other is saying, it slips away.
I was told by a Swede that they used to watch Finnish TV programmes and try to figure out what they were talking about.
No mountains in Denmark either, though.
The name “Scandinavia” doesn’t come from the name of the mountains:
The name was first applied to southern Sweden and then extended to the entire peninsula and only later applied to the mountains.
But I was going to go skiing! But really, Finland’s highest point is 7.74x Denmark’s. Denmark is pretty much Florida without as much wet heat, or the meth.
(Norway’s top point is 14.44x Denmark).
Oh, we have meth alright.
No, crocodiles though…
… But only because we killed them all, dissected 'em in front of our children, and fed our lions with their meat.
True, and Denmark is included to Scandinavia by Germanic language and culture. In Finland we have neither 
Oh, damn, so all these years I got it backwards. Thanks, ignorance fought :). But anyways the point remains, Finland’s no part of southern Sweden, of the peninsula, or of the mountain range.
It’s noteworthy that about 5 % of Finns speak Swedish. Finnish military leader and later President Carl Gustav Mannerheim didn’t speak Finnish very well. Another well-known Swedish speaking Finn is Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame).
What particular experience have you had? The closest I have been to Finland is Beech Grove, Indiana.
I guess your disagreement is with Burnam, not me.
In any case, remember that Finland didn’t even exist as a country before World War I; it was a “grand duchy” in the Russian Empire. I would guess that the Finns have less of a beef with the Swedes (or the Danes, or the Norwegians) than with the Russians.
Now we also have a Finn in this thread adding to the evidence that Burnam’s statement is inaccurate.
Before Finland was part of Russia, it was part of Sweden from the twelfth century to the eighteenth century. I can’t find anything about what it was considered part of before then. There have been modern human beings living in that area since about 8900 B.C., but it appears that there wasn’t anything resembling a country before the twelfth century:
I don’t have much material about Finland myself. The only other thing Burnam said was that Finnish and Swedish are both official languages in Finland; in Book about a Thousand Things, George Stimpson noted that the Swedes “have had a cultural influence on the Finns for eight hundred years.”
I think you can learn things quicker and more accurately by consulting sources on the Internet like Wikipedia than by looking in a 1985 book by one author that claims to have information about a thousand things. Finland became a part of Sweden in 1249, although the Swedes had been raiding it for a century or so before that. 1985 - 1249 = 836, so saying that it was influenced by the Swedes for eight hundred years is about right, I guess.
Extensive and intimate experience.
You’re right; I should have been more clear. My disagreement is with Burnam.
You might be surprised. Seriously. The Finns were better off under the Russians than under the Swedes, and the incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1810 may be seen as something of a liberation.
The Winter War happened within living memory; Swedish oppression back in the 18th century, not so much.
My first acquaintance with Stimpson’s book, and this topic, was in 1964, when I was a high-school freshman. It was a library book then, but I have a copy of my own now. (Burnam acknowledged his debt to Stimpson in the forewords of his two volumes.)
I also corresponded briefly with an Esperantist in Hungary in the late 60s; from what he told me your claims about Finnish vis-a-vis Turkish seem to be verified.
(Secondary consideration: All of the so-called Ural-Altaic languages seem to eschew grammatical gender–not only not assigning masculine or feminine gender to inanimate objects, but not even having separate words for “he,” “she,” and “it.”