Reaction To Finnish Language 

I've been learning Finnish for eight years, and have been there a few times. It feels like a second home, and the language has brought so much into my life. Suomi on niin ihana maa. 🇫🇮💙🤍 Paljon rakkautta Kandasta, Suomi!

A comment from a Swede (who do not speak Finnish): The novel "Tuntematon Sotilas" by Våinö Linna was translated to Swedish when it was published in Finland. The book which is a story about a company of Finnish soldiers in the Continuation War has characters talking in different Finnish dialects. The translator then used different .Swedish dialects in Finland for the different characters. That gave this amazing novel a very distinct "Finnish touch" to a Swedish reader.

Dialects in Finland vary usually not from city to city but more from region to region and there are a lot of dialects and we can understand them all but no one can understand Saame, it is just a different language. We understand more Estonian than Saame. Most people "keep" their dialect always but I "lost" mine. I lived in western Finland for 15 years and had the dialect, then moved to eastern Finland and that dialect stuck on me when I lived there 10 years. Then I moved to Helsinki and I basically lost all dialect. 😁

My mothers mother was from Karelia and i loved to listen her speak/sing in Karelian as a child ❤ could only understand parts, but i always found it to be a very happy language. I really miss her and her knowledge...and im proud to be of Karelian decent. Our lineage also has roots in middle Asia. There are still nomads in that area that live the same lifestyle as our ancestors and the Sami people (the first people of Finland). Our land is ancient, it has been here from the beginning and is like its people...steady, reliable, stubborn and proud!

It wasn't mentioned there but in Finnish language every letter equals one sound and is always the same. Unlike let's say English where sometimes C is like "S" and sometimes more like "K", as in words "celsius" and "cola", respectively. The letter C, while at it, is also absent from our native words but in general the pronunciation of any letter doesn't alter from world to world and you don't need to know context or the word beforehand to know how it's pronounced correctly. Learn the alphabet once and you're set. We also don't have silent letters in words so only thing left is to figure out the syllable structure if the word is new but even then it usually follows pattern from other already know words so it's a quick process. We have a guy called Ismo Leikola who does this observational stand up around this topic. Also in English for your viewing pleasure 😁

The word order is quite free in Finnish. The example sentence "Tori on kaupungin keskellä" could just as well be written "Tori on keskellä kaupunkia" or "Keskellä kaupunkia on tori" or "Kaupungin keskellä on tori" and all are just as fine. This does not apply to all sentences, but does still in many cases. The difference is in the context are using the sentence in. If you start with the word "Tori" (marketplace), the marketplace was most likely spoken about in the previous sentence. You put the the word "kaupunki" (city) in front, your previous sentence most likely spoke about the city and so on.

In modern Finland dialects are no longer that distant from each other. You can still notice from which part of Finland person is coming from but you can easily understand all dialects (if you are native finnish that is). Before internet age differences were bigger and more unique words were used. There are some humoristic examples of for example Donald Duck (Aku Ankka) translated to specific finnish dialects and you might find having hard time understanding some words but you still understand what is written from the context.

You'd be surprised, in Finland where we have the 5% of the population who are native Swedish speakers, we have distinct dialects of Swedish in different parts of Finland which are barely intelligible to other Swedish speaking finns, and to most Swedish speakers outside Finland as well.

Rauma (Western Coast) dialect is very hard to understand sometimes. It sounds like estonian. That's because there was lot of trading going on between Rauma (and West Coast / southwest coast) and Estonia back in the day.

5:15 It may be that Finnish became an official language in Finland only 150 years ago, but I think back then it would have been a very distant thing what some law books far away from most people said. People would just speak the language(s) they had learned, possibly different languages with different people, but most of the time they would communicate with people in the same neighborhood (because distances that seem short with modern technology and infrastructure would have been very long back then). So, giving the Finnish language the official status would have been more like recognizing an existing fact than actually changing anything. Kind of approaching the situation when someone "discovered" gravity -- obviously gravity would have always been around, but at that point someone would have put the thing on paper.

The only Finnish dialect I have troubles in understanding is the old Rauma dialect. The other Finnish dialects are quite understandable, although they have some words and expressions which are unknown to me. But since all my grandparents were from different parts of the country I am used hearing all of them since a little kid. I also understand Estonian, but that is because I have been studying it, and Liivi (Livonian) and Vatja (Votic), although to understand those I need to concentrate hard.

My experience (as a Finn) is that if you try to guess what Estonians say there is very high change to completely misunderstand what they're trying to say. Estonian words often sound similar to Finnish but may have completely different meaning. There may be many reasons for this, I suspect one is that German has more influence in Estonian. However, Karelian language spoken in Russia close to Finnish border also sounds familiar to the Finns, but in this case a speaker of Finnish can actually guess right, especially if he or she is familiar enough eastern dialects of Finnish. This is why I like listen to music with Karelian lyrics: its kind of fun guessing game where you have real change to guess right!

You definitely can tell where in Finland someone is from by the way they are speaking or the accent/dialect, some people especially older generations usually have stronger accents and they even very often have completely different words for certain things that some finnish people might have never heard of

Whatever the other commentators write, we can understand every Finnish dialect. They just sound different and some (rare) words can be different. From Estonian I can understand 50-60 %. In youtube you can find Karelian language spoken in Northwest Russia, and I can understand 90%. BTW, I grew up in Southeastern Finland. I have not lived there for 40 years, but I still speak Southeastern dialect. And if you know Malaysian or Indonesian languages, the pronunciation with Finnish is the same. Just read aloud Finnish text as if it was one of those two languages and every Finn would understand what you say (I have been working with pulp industry in Indonesia). BTW your Scottish accent is very easy to understand, I have been talking with some other Brits and cannot say the same...

My brother and his friend selected a small football club from UK and started a little fanclub in Finland. They visited their pub in UK and people were delighted that some folks in Finland would like their team and even learned their song. When they hear my brother and his friend talk Finnish tho... They could not believe such a language exists. They made a test: One was in other side of the room and was whispered a sentence. he had to yell it to the other guy and he had to translate that back to english. Ofc it worked flawlessly and people were amazed. Ye I know it's a weird sounding language.

All Finnish dialects are totally understandable. There are some different words in different regions, where I have to ask what it means, but often even those are understandable through context. It's a totally different story when someone from outside the capital region comes here, as the Helsinki slang is full of its own words.

I'm a swedish speaking finn and I understand almost all finnish dialects. My wife is very good at pinpointing what dialect and from where different finnish people are. She talks only finnish at her work. I work in a totally swedish environment (swedish speaking school) so I don't hear finnish as frequently. Some swedish dialects here in Finland can be super hard to understand. The swedish dialects in ostrobotnia (west part of Finland) are considered to be as near old original swedish as you can get today, Back to finnish. In the east of Finland, the finnish dialect Karjaa will often squeeze the words together just like in french. They also leave a lot of consonants out, so they use a lot of vowels one after the other. The same goes for the northen Finland. I personally think Finnish is one of the most beautiful language to express yourself in. Finnish poetry and song texts are eyewatering beautiful. The way you can construct a new word is on an other level in Finnish. I feel my own language Swedish feels quite poor in that context. Greetings from Finland!

As a finnish speaking person I can understand all differet dialects, more or less. But there is this Rauma dialect which can be undertood only by people in Rauma area.

I'm finn .. and while liveing abroad I do speak german and english as well. From finnish dialects I do understand with ease the most of them, but it doesn't mean I could speak similarly. There is still one specific dialect spoken in Rauma-city on the west coast that I do not grasp even a half. Some people say, it's like schwiizerdüütsch (spoken in many dialects in Switzerland), that I do understand quite fluently. In addition to those dialects also slang is spoken in capital area, that changes a lot on every decade telling the listener very straight how old the speaker is.

One of the obstacles learning Finnish is spoken language. It differs a lot from written language.

Dialect in Finland vary a lot. Easters and western dialects are pretty different but both native speakers mostly can communicate each other. There ia tens of dialects here.

Yes I can understand the different dialects. Not all of the words but about maybe 90 percent… What throws me off is sometimes the meaning of shared words in one dialect viruttaa means to rinse and in other it means to stretch something. Washing the floor I said that I just need to viruttaa the floor and I’m done and my friend looked at me weirdly thinking why do I want to stretch the floor? Or the word tuimaa if I say this soup is tuimaa, in other dialect it means that it has too much salt while in the other it means that it doesnt have enough salt. I said this as the soup had too much salt and I was going to try fixing it but as I turned I saw my friend with the salt packet ready to add more. Im happy that I saw it before she added more in. Those instanses I remembered back then that I was 600 km away from home 😅

While these days it's relatively easy to understand other dialects around Finland, there are unique words to some, and parsing the meaning can be difficult. Older people tend to have stronger dialects than younger people. My family is from a region, about 200 km from where we live now, but the dialect difference was stark. After moving, my parents adopted a more neutral dialect to fit in better. Because I grew up without hearing the old dialect, I remember being 5 years old and having great difficulty understanding what my then 80 year old grandfather was saying. Also, being from the south, visiting Oulu, about half way north, some locals had trouble understanding me, as some key words were a little different. Experience with different dialect helps a ton, and most differences are small, and getting smaller, as people move across Finland, and young people are exposed to other dialects.

I think I have heard so many different dialects in my life, that I sort of understand them all, and the differences in daily, common use are quite little. Like a formal word "minä" (I), can be said in spoken language as "mä", in the Eastern parts of Finland "mie" and Western parts "mää". Structurally "mä" ja "mie" seem quite distant from each other, but... I have travelled across Finland three times since 2020. I have gone through the Western coast of Finland up to Inari which is in the northernmost Finland. I have been in Tornio and Kuusamo respectively, and I have had no difficulties in understanding what people are saying. I have also gone along the Eastern border to Suomussalmi, to Savonlinna and Imatra. There are minor differences in spoken language, but no difficulty whatsoever to understand what people are saying. But... again... I do think it is not the cities and towns of Finland where you could find bigger differences. But the differences come when you speak with the farmers, reindeer owners (the Sapmi people), and rural people in any place in Finland. There you can hear the dialects much better. And sometimes, it is harder to understand the language, when the dialect is sharper and people are using special words that are only used locally. One common example is when we talk about a birch whisk used in sauna. In some places people call it "vihta" and in other places it is "vasta". Also speaking of hair (on the head), the formal word would be "hiukset", but in other places it is called "tukka" which could sound a bit awkward in the places, where people call the hair "hiukset", because "tukka" could refer to the pubic hair. There is also some local, and dying languages in Finland, like the dialect of Rauma. It is a Hansa language which is a combination of Estonian, German, Swedish and English. It has a lot in common with Estonian in that, they are very close to Finnish, but the vocabulary has major differences.

There are very few dialects that have completely unique words for some things, all the dialects can understand each other as long as these words don't come up. The dialects are more spread out, so the whole region usually speaks the same dialect instead of just the city but Finns can usually point out if it's a western, northern, or eastern dialect, and those who are more familiar with dialects might be able to point out the region because they are distinct through the way different dialects shorten or elongate syllables and have some vowel shifts. The languages that were listed as technically being dialects are actually a lot further away from Finnish dialects so they're right on the border of if they're their own languages or dialects of Finnish, they have plenty of words that are recognizable as a Finnish speaker but the majority of words are so different that you can't guess it. Saami is it's own whole language group, there are 3 different Saami languages spoken in Finland, Karjala is it's own language (debatably 2 languages), Estonian has a lot of words that sound the same but mean different things but a Finnish speaker can somewhat survive in Estonia with just Finnish, and Meänkieli is somewhat intelligble for northern dialects but western and eastern have no chance to understand anything. I'm from eastern Finland, but I have friends from all over.

About accent and dialects: yes they vary quite much. I live in a area (City of Sastamala in Pirkanmaa) where dialects changes when you go 10Km in to any directions. Dialects changes here often but somehow it's more intense here. Also little trivia: there Is one dialect which is like singing: the dialect of Tyrvää. It's not only about the words but the rythm and tone/notes you use. It's a very small dialect, I'd say only 1000 people speaks it but it's very unique if you ask me!

Yes I can understand all Finnish dialects, at least the ones I’ve heard so far and I’ve been all over. There are some words and sayings that are harder to understand, for example a word can mean something else in a different dialect. Here in the south “en kehtaa” means “I would be embarrassed to do X” but in the east it means “I couldn’t be bothered to do X“

I work with people who are from several regions of Finland and there are many words that I have never even heard of and I have had to ask what it means. And famously the people from Savo region make up new words all the time. I have always thought that Finnish must be a nightmare to learn because it’s so different.

As a Finn that came to an exchange student period to Glesga for 6months, it is awesome to hear you speak (although your accent is not deeply glaswegian in this video😅) and especially to hear you speak about my native language 🎉😊 I was sooooo confused for 3 weeks after landing there but after few months a couple of glesga lads thought I was from around there with irish heritage after we had a conversation 😂😂

I have absolutely no head for languages. I do learn them by listening and immersing rather than reading but I don't pay that much attention to WHAT I'm hearing, just the flow and everyday logic, and same goes for my own language, Finnish. But from other people, I've observed they can indeed make pretty accurate guesses on where someone is from, just by listening to them. I can only hear the most obvious ones, Karjala and Savo, but people around me can do way better. I've been living all around the country, originally from Pohjois-Pohjanmaa, but lived in Etelä-Pohjanmaa, Kainuu, Etelä-Karjala, Varsinais-Suomi and Pirkanmaa, I've lost most regional accent I've had. Most people can't place me. But still, some have, with surprising accuracy. Even tho the most distinct thing about how I speak now is mie/sie (me/you) that I got infected with in Etelä-Karjala, which is definitely NOT where I'm from. Some people can indeed place me to where I was born.

Yes, there are somewhat distinct dialects in Finland based on where people are from. For example people from Turku town have pretty distinct dialect ("Turun Murre"). However, perhaps because we have separate spoken and written Finnish, the latter perhaps keeps even the spoken language "in check" and the dialects can't become wildly different from each other, which is perhaps more of the case in the UK. It is easy to believe Finnish language has similarities with Malay language, because they say Finnish language is closer to Japanese than English!

As a Finn I can more or less understand all the dialects though there are some few words that are specific to some areas and those can be a problem. I'm not an expert at recognizing from where people are based on their dialect but some are good at that. But about articles: I have to say that when I started to learn English as my first foreign language, I really remember struggling with articles. I could not fathom what they were and why they were used, why they were sometimes used and sometimes not. And the distinction between "a", "an" and "the"... It was horrible. But I suppose that if you are totally used to them and have studied only other languages that have them, it would feel really odd to learn a language which does not have them at all. And by the way, I think I'm pretty fine with articles nowadays as I do have a master's degree of English and Swedish.

Finnish are really into their language and probably make up for the majority of viewers of this video. Finnish dialects are in my opinion just as varied as the British dialects, and these are inside the Finnish language and outside the "seperate languages" like Karelian, Mäenkieli, Estonian, Kven. You can speak Rauma or Helsinki dialect without general finnish able to understand them.

I would say the a native Finnish speaker will understand majority of the dialects spoken in Finland. The only exceptions would be some old dialects that are not really spoken anywhere anymore except by a very small group of people. Some dialects are harder to understand than others though, especially if someone has a very strong accent. But it's also easy to tell which region of Finland the person is from by their dialect.

I have a good example for this, how different the word pair grandma and grandpa can be in Finnish depending on where you live in Finland. so the words are the same as in the recent sentence. Isoäiti ja isoisä Mummu ja pappa Mummi ja ukki Tummu ja tuora Tuta ja tuuva Mummu ja vaari

As a native speaker of German, living in Finland for almost a decade now already, I can say that learning the language definitely DOES have its challenges. You have to bend your mind a lot indeed, thinking in those completely different grammatical patterns. I still haven't mastered it 100%. To the current day 😅 BUT, it's definitely not impossible. It of course requires a lot of work, dedication and patience. But then again, what doesn't, if you wanna be good at it one day? Terveisiä Etelä-Suomesta!

I think the understanding different dialects in the country depends on where you're from or have mostly lived. My mom is from Päijät-Häme region and my father was from Pohjois-Karjala (North Karelia), and we mostly lived within Eastern dialect area. My parents had misunderstandings due to some very dialect-specific words and dialect-specific pronunciation of common words. 😅 When I went to school from 3rd to 4th grade in Hämeenlinna, which is farther to the Western dialect area than I'd ever lived, I had difficulties understanding some of the expressions the kids who had lived there their entire lives used. Similarly, when in my teens I met people from the West coast, especially from Rauma, it was almost like listening to Estonian: I basically almost understood it but there were more completely foreign words there that changed the meaning into unknown mysteries 😂

Regarding dialects, today the differences between, for example, cities are mostly small variations in pronunciation and vocabulary. Before radio and TV - and with them the neutral-ish language used in public broadcasting - became widespread, regional dialects were further apart. It is still, however, possible to know someones place of origin from spoken Finnish, especially from the dialectical form of the first person singular pronoun "minä" they use.

Native fin here. I speak mostly the northern Finland (Oulunmurre) dialect. We stress quite a lot of certain letters and also add them in words. "Pöhlö" or "Silly/fool" would be said "Pöhölö" here. We can understand dialects pretty well, but there can be some hilarious different meanings like" "Alakko nää mua" which in written would be "Alatko sinä minua?". It means here in the north "Wanna hang out?" But in written form it means more like "Wanna date me"

I understand everyone easily, I'm from Tampere but I've lived mostly in Helsinki/Vantaa. My relatives from Tampere have a slightly different "r" and maybe accent. I think non-natives wouldn't notice anything. Then living in Turku I noticed they had a few peculiarities, like conjugating some words in the past like in Estonian language. For example "nukkua" is to sleep and the past "nukuin", but in Turku they might say "nukkusin" and in Estonian it's "magasin". The -sin ending is used with many verbs but not in all. Some of the verbs they say like it is in standard Finnish. However in Savonia I had small difficulties to understand everything that my great-aunt was say in her very thick Savonian dialect. In parts of northern Finland they add a lot of H's everywhere, I can understand them easily but it sounds really strange with so many H's all over.

Thanks for your video and greetings from Helsinki! I find the Rauma dialect difficult to understand, other dialects I understand quite well...Although there may be individual words that I don't understand.

Dialects used to be more distinct that they are now for sure. I have been listening to recorded dialect sound bits from the 50s from the Institute of National Languages (KOTUS) website and some of them are really hard to understand. And I still think I understand more Karealian language than the Rauma dialect.

Origin of our language group in Asia. That explain similarity to Asian languages. F.ex Japanese has similar vocal harmony that Finnish have.

I have worked for the Swedish Embassy, and we launched a social media campaign about the similarities between Swedish (a Germanic language) and Finnish in the form of loan words mostly. People got really excited and added their own examples. It's intriguing to date this language interaction back over 500 years.

I'm Hungarian and I speak Finnish. Hungarian is also related to Finnish, just much further than Estonian. All three are Fenno-Ugric languages, and these are the 3 countries where a Fenno-Ugric language is the official language (Finland, Estonia, Hungary). We have a lot of similarities: no genders, (but "gender equality built in the language" made me smile), list of grammatical cases almost identical, no future tense, agglutination, but the biggest thing we share is pronunciation (including vowel harmony, stress always on the first syllable, the existence of unstressed long vowels, stressed short vowels etc). So for a Hungarian, Finnish is less different than English or German. I think it is a difficult language, but Hungarians usually learn it faster than speakers of European languages.

I grew up in Kymenlaakso which is a small region between Uusimaa and Southern Karelia, so my native dialect has features of both Western Finnish and Eastern Finnish, which are the two main groups. Furthermore Kymenlaakso was known as an area where people would move to from all around the country because of the wood pulp and paper industries, so there are expressions from all around the place. Therefore my native dialect has a lot of expressions from all other Finnish dialects, but it is distinct in its own right because of that.

As someone who lives in what i consider the middle (Northern Ostrobothnia), yes, whether i go north or south, the change is very noticeable.

That Paul's channel is brilliant. I have followed him for years. You told that there are similarities with the system of Malay (that you can speak) and Finnish, so I guess you would learn Finnish easily. Just go for it! Many other watchers have commented that they understand all dialects and that's true. They are intelligible, but it's usually quite easy to guess where somebody is originally from. The dialect learned in the youth stays quite strong even after living in another area for decades.

The dialects used to be way more different, with unique vocabularies, but after one "official" "book finnish" was constructed and started to be used in schools and books etc. they started moving towards that "official" finnish. Closer to modern day people started moving around a lot more instead of staying in one region all their lived. And in the last maybe 70 years (?) the increased consumption of media has unified the language and culture more and more.

People in Helsinki had their own dialect slang origin from swedish, russian and finnish language mix which was incomprehensible to people outside Helsinki.

As a native speaker, I'd say that the Finnish dialects are not too different from each other. The English accents in the UK have way more variation - Some of them can be really challenging (like Northumberland or remote parts of Scotland, or even Manchester and Liverpool). Many Finns who speak pretty good English might have trouble understanding your Glaswegian accent, so understanding other dialects and accents becomes easier when you have more everyday connections to the speakers of other dialects. Southern Ostrobothnian dialect has a lot of Swedish loanwords, and I bet they can be quite foreign to someone who's not from that region, same with the Rauma dialect. Many old dialects are disappearing though because people from different parts of the country are more connected than they were 100 or even 30 years ago and they adjust their language to be something more neutral when they move to larger cities to study. Most will never return to their hometowns. I've spoken two different dialects (Central Ostrobothnian and Central Finnish) until I moved to Helsinki and today my Finnish is something quite typical that is spoken in the capital region although I've lived abroad for nearly a decade now. Nobody speaks the written standard though, except news anchors and politicians, so it's something comparable to received pronunciation or BBC English. Our language is complicated and full of long words so we do take a lot of shortcuts and there are a lot of slang words varying from old Helsinki working-class slang (think about something like Cockney but without the rhyming bits) to modern internet culture slang. This type of language changes and evolves all the time and seems to be more common than old dialects, especially among younger speakers from the south coast.

There are very similar sounding words in Finnish and Estonian language, but in general, they can't be understood. I find it out once when visiting Estonian country side. In North, people usually speak some Finnish or English but in 20 years ago and countryside, none. In hotel, it was practically impossible to understand what receptionist wanted to say. Those similar words just don't come up in everyday language.

Dialects are sometimes really hard to understand as words might have different meanings or forms. But yes, you can get by with almost anyone if you really need to. Also we all get taught swedish and english at school so you can always mix the words a little.

About the dialects of the language. I always use these examples as it gives some solid proof for my claims of Finnish dialects being like their own languages: Finnish dialects vary so much that I've had to be a translator for my relatives and my significant others each time they have met. The example I use is how my aunt who has lived her entire life in Norther Savonia where I hail from called me while I was at my friends place in 9th grade and I put the call on speaker. We spoke around 45 minutes and after that my then best friend nonchalantly said "I didn't understand anything but the curse words from that conversation.". Also my dad has had in his CV Finnish and Northern Savonian as the languages he speak for the last 3 decades 😂 My best friend nowadays is Norther Savonian himself as well and when we had a task in school and were assigned into groups we had a dialogue about the subject we're being tasked for and everyone else from our group went outside for a smoke break when we started to talk about the subject. Later on when we had started to work already the rest came back and asked us have we stopped fighting already. We both we're puzzled and asked what they're talking about. Since they all were from the capital area they didn't understand that Savonian people use passion in their wording and when you're not sure what they say it sounds super hostile, much like German to non German speakers.

twenty-some years ago I was working at my former school, mainly on the computers, and we got a group of Polish teens to visit, with some of their teachers along. There was this silly joke that when you put a glossy coating on wood it is called finish, but on your nails it is called polish.

It's easy to geolocate people here based on the dialect, although some are just pros in this field. As an example: i have lived my childhood in western-Finland, then moved to Rovaniemi for studies and when i visited Helsinki few years later, one person there was able to decode my voice in seconds, where i had lived and where i was living at the moment, some are jus amazing at this.

About dialects in Finland. I have always said that the Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland) speak the same language with regional differences. In Finland, the dialects are more like their own languages, the spelling and pronunciation of the whole word changes. A person from the northeast may not necessarily understand anything spoken by a person from the southwest. For example, even a basic word like "minä" (in English "I") changes from region to region to: minä, mä, mää, mie, miä, meje, meitsi, meikä, meikäläinen etc. So yeah, regional differences can be difficult, even to native Finns.

Wäre ich nicht schon zu alt dafür ( 68), würde ich finnisch lernen! Mir gefällt die Sprache , die Lieder und die Literatur ! Liebe Grüsse aus Deutschland!

I used to live in the UK and as a Finn it was quite difficult to learn to be polite. We can a bit blunt and say "what" instead of pardon or sorry. So often people think that finnish people are rude but that's not the case it just the cultural and language differences. We can also be brutally honest if someone asks "how are you"?

There are different dialects in different parts of Finland. Naturally we have the "BBC English" standard finnish language spoken in news etc.

Yes, Finnish speaking people in generally understand all the different Finnish dialects even "meänkieli" in Northern Sweden . A little bit difficult is the Rauma-town-dialect. I self have two mother tongue: Finnish and Swedish, and in my living area Swedish is s.c. "Viking-Swedish dominant. In Sweden they have very difficult to understand this Swedish dialect. ... I love Finland, Finnish language and Kalevala. Did you know, that you can sing Kalevala from cover to cover ... I loved to sing Kalevala to my children like lullaby, and now to my grandchildren. The old fashion way to sing Kalevala is sooooo beautiful ... agent ... like Nomadic, Byzantium way... low and soft singing and you use the trout voice too.

Regarding the Scottish accents: I once visitded a restaurant in Dundee and couldn't figure out when the waitress said "Tea casseet". After a few repetitions I realized she was saying "Take a seat" 🤣

Yes, Estonian is the only language similar and we have so many same words. But sometimes they mean different things. As it happens, I’m an Estonian living in Finland for around 10 years. It has been quite easy to learn the language cause of the similarities. Rumor has it we all used to be finns in Estonia. Or maybe it’s just a theory lol. Anyways. Terveisiä kaikille suomalaisille ja virolaisille 🤗❤️

Two important points about Finnish language - It is spoken and written almost 100% identically - Word transformations are almost automatic as a child (typically very little corrections are needed) Together these things make Finnish very easy for native speakers. Most kids learn basics of reading and writing before starting school without formal education (reading books to them is typically enough). There is no years of learning spelling but kids go to advanced learning.

As finnish i can hear differences with dialect in Finland. I can also hear dialects in/on egnlish :D

I dont know if this is the case in every language, but in finnish it is easy to tell if person is native speaker or has learnt the language by other means. Even if the person has lived 20 years in Finland there is always subtle things. Spoken finnish must be really hard to master.

11:46 About learning languages, from a Finn! We begin learning Swedish in 5th grade. And the basics are fairly easy, but no matter how much we revised some of the Swedish grammar rules, I and many others just wouldn't learn them! They might look simple on paper, and for some simple words I can add the correct end bit: -en, -or, etc... But I thought I was such an idiot because I just can't make Swedish make sense to me. I've used different techniques and have had several teachers explain it all to me and help me, but it just won't click! And it might be because it's not the same as Finnish for the most part and is part of a whole different language group. Part of it could also be that since we began learning it later on, it doesn't stick as well. The younger you start learning a new language, the better. On the other hand, we start studying English in 3rd grade. And while English is also extremely different as a language, somehow it makes perfect sense to me. It clicked immediately and once I had a very basic vocabulary, I expanded it really easily by watching RU-vid. People have actually mistaken me for a tourist from like America when I've just been speaking to a friend in English lol

Hey, you asked if we Finns can understand easily each other’s accent or language. Yes, although there are some differences in the dialects, we can understand easily each other’s. At least in the main language that is spoken in Finland. I don’t know the mäenkieli, kveens, or other language mentioned in this video.

I would say that the differences in accents are pretty distinct, where you can conclude which region of Finland the speaker is from, but not as distinct as in the UK where you can figure out his or her home town, school background, social status etc...

yes, the way finnish speak changes to where you go- but its less about the city to city difference and more about what part of finland it is- is it the more north part of finland or more south part? the way we speak changes, but the words carry the same weight and meaning still

There is also another similarity with the Malay and Finnish the word sama 😁😁 in both languages it means the same, and literally “sama” means same in both languages. In Finland we have different dialects. Normally we can understand each other, but there might be some words that we use different ways or totally different words. Also Helsinki has its own dialect that has loaned words from other languages, and that can be quite tricky to understand. But then again a person from the capital might not understand what others speak or what the words mean in other parts of Finland. Also in Rauma they have their own language that has roots in the Hansa times. (Middle age Hansa towns) Also there are different cultures and ways to be in different parts of the country. Like in north people are more relaxed and slower than in the south. And there are certain stereotypes of different regions, like Savo, that is in eastern part, there is a saying that the listener is the one who has to take the responsibility of what he/she hears (not the speaker). So basically you can’t trust their words which is quite important to us, or at least has been. 😅 But also this has changed a lot of how it was decades ago, but you can still see and hear these differences and the dialects, even tough the youngsters in Helsinki hardly know how to speak Finnish anymore, as they are monkeying the foreigners. More commonly people use yleiskieli or kirjakieli ~ common language, or the written language, so that is understandable for all. Foreigners have difficulty with this cause we write and read in this written language, but when we talk the language is totally different. And of course you can write it as well, but in the schools etc. the written language is always used in the books and we have to learn the correct way of spelling etc. as well, but when we speak the language alters and sometimes quite a lot.

I'm finnish. The more north you go the harder it is to understand the dialect (I've lived near capital city and in Lappeenranta, which is southeast of finland). My best friend is from Jyväskylä and 1st time we met I had some trouble of understanding altough the words are very basic (so not many slang words if any) but the way they talk made it kinda hard to follow so I had to ask her to repeat several times :'D In Lappeenranta I don't really see much differences in dialect if compared to the capital city area the most noticeable difference is probably how people say "I/me" and "you" which is in capital city area "mä" and "sä" and in Lappeenranta it's "mie" and "sie"

In Sweden we have in recent years started to use the Finnish "Hän" only, for some dumb reason (to confuse people, I guess) we decided to write it "hen", like the English word. For maximum confusion? I wish we had just spelled it the same as the Finnish word.

Fun fact regarding latin as a language of religion: You know the magic words "Hocus pocus"? It's actually from when the communion bread is consacrated with the latin words "Hoc est corpus meus" - "This is my body"

There are distinct dialects, but for the most part they are pretty understandable if it is just a Finnish dialect and not one of other the related languages. Probably the hardest to understand dialect would be the one in the capital city, Stadin Slangi it's called. It apparently came about originally around 1900 when you had people there who mostly only spoke either Finnish or Swedish, and s to communicate they ended up making a sort of pidgin language between Swedish and Finnish to communicate which over the years transformed into a dialect.

There is no difficulty in understanding finnish dialects, but the ones outside the borders (that were listed), are, though you can guess your way through.

The answer to the question in the thumbnail is "no". There are many languages that have rarer and unusual features w.r.t language typology than Finnish does. And many languages have similar typology in some respects. Grammatical gender is apparently present in less than half of the languages of the world. Ancient loans mean to me something else than what probably is true for "koulu" or "tuoli". "Koulu" was probably loaned when schools came to known in Finland, so after the 12th century. That was many hunderds of years ago but is it "ancient"?

Hi, I'm a native Finnish speaker, and to answer your question, yes, we do note people speaking in different regional dialect. But within our borders, we still largely understand what is spoken. Resently, we have unfortunately gotten immigrants, which struggle with basic Finnish and we're stuck with broken finnish and english. IMO, not good for anyone.

I can pretty easily distinguish where someone has lived in Finland by just accent. Eastern and northern accents are harder to understand but not too bad.

Yeah, we can understand the different dialects nowadays, before it was harder, especially if the speaker was older. But there may still be some special namings/words, that might not be clear without explanation. The official language has changed things a lot.

Mäenkieli is probably the one that is closest to being a dialect and a own language at the same time. i understand what those people say generally, but not in detail.

I'm very bad with picking up where someone is from by me listening to them speak. It goes to english too, like I cannot tell a difference always unless their accent is very heavy and even then I cannot place it properly. I would just go mentally "oh yeah they from x country maybe because how they sound to me" and I could still be complitely wrong.

The phrase "I don't know", in finnish is "Minä en tiedä" or "En tiedä" but funnily in Turun murre it's said "Emmäätiä" 😂

I'm from Southern Ostrobotnia region of Finland and I can't understand Savonian dialects very well. But there are words even in my own region, but in different towns, that I don't understand. Standard Finnish is learned in school, but the dialects in different regions and even towns can vary a lot.

I can compare finnish dialects to be as similar as english, us, australian, scottish, etc. You can totally tell where the person is from and also understand it.

There some dialects that are hard to understand. For example: I have lived in this small town 38 years now (since I was 6). Yet few days ago I was stumbed by a client who asked me: Pitäisikö minun käydä potsloikaa että saat voideltua kinnakset? She explained that potsloikka meant pitkälleen (to lay down) and kinnakset are the two bones (or end of one bone) on the sides of the ankle. I asked my friend who has lived here his whole life and he understood the sentence. Other local words: Niepriä which means damp and holotna which means (to be) cold.

It's very rare for someone to speak a dialect so "completely" that it would be hard to understand. Maybe sometimes if it's an older person who lives in a small village in the middle of nowhere (so, practically 99% of Finland 😂) who rarely leaves his home.

As a native Finnish speaker, I can understand all Finnish languages and dialects.

Finnish accents are mutually comprehensible. People tend to talk in their accents with other locals, and in standard Finnish with everybody else, especially in professional situations.

Some very old specific words from different areas are impossible to know. Other than that you can communicate with ease with different regions.

My man, Finnish is nicely described by Jr R Tolkien; Finnish is the nr 1 language of Filosofy, easily competing with Sanskrit and ancient Greece. So it may be bit of a toil but I appreciate you for going for it. Just Gret.

The finnish dialects dont have much difference in the way we say the words but people use different words which makes it harder to understand If you know what a specfic dialect sounds like you can probably tell where they are from but because of social media younger people kind of merge their way of speaking online so its really only noticable with people who didnt grow up with social media.

The finnish language was there for a far longer time. What you are seeing and talking about is what kingdoms considered as "official" languages. Just like latin was the official language in churches.

I have worked 22 years at Finnish National Land Survey and been around the country. I am from Eastern Finland. When I worked at Western Finland (Pori) I went to store and there cashier said that you are from same place that she's husband. I found out that she's husband was from 20 km where I was born..

We finns love to bully the word with long, longer, longest words like " saippuakukkakivikakkukauppias" (salesman who sales soap, flowers, stones and cakes and it is even a palindrome) But don't worry. We like when people learn some finnish. We do speak quite good english in general, but it is always nice to hear people learning even basics.

Hi, fellow Malaysian haha. Since you live here, you may know that Tamil is an agglutinative language. Chinese languages also don't have grammatical gender. I guess Finnish is similar to a few languages in Malaysia :)

Also, I have big history and culture buff to Scotland, hopefully you will get your freedom, I love bagpipes, would love to learn gaelic etc so ye wee bastard have one more subscribtion from Finland.... ;P

Even I don’t know finnish grammatic at all, I just finishin a book I wrote in finnish, 1680 pages. I am 76 year old finnish man.

The lecturer clearly states: that the word stress in Finnish ' is ALWAYS on the first syllable. Helsinki a case in point. It's 'Helsinki, not Hel'sinki. cf. 'Ottawa, 'Canberra, not Ot'tawa, Can'berra. N.B. stares in F is ALWAYS on the first syllable. 'Helsinli is just as straightforward.

the agglutinative language bit where they used the different additions to the base form of house (talo) made me think of the meme comic about english and couple other countries going: dog, a dog, the dog and later down the line comes finland and starts with the word for dog that is koira and then proceeds to list like couple hundred different versions koiran, koiralle, koiralta, koirallekin and so on.... and then says: and now the plurals... the second thing that came to mind was the fact that in spoken language sure we sometimes use those words like the "taloissanikinko?" but most of the time the it would be said differently like for example "minunkin talois?" where the sentance would still mean the same "also in my houses?" at least as far as the conversation is concerned..... and to further exemplify the how using those i, ssa, ni, kin, ko, kaan and others added in a row i was doubted about one of the words in the koira comic bit not being something that could be realistically used and it took me 15minutes to come up with a situation where a person would reasonably be able to use the monster of a word but had to instantly also agree that while the resulting word is grammatically correct and could be used in a sentence i could quite confidently bet that theres 0% chance for anyone to say it that way unless they are heavily autistic in the way they speak.