Finnish

Abstract

Finnish belongs to the (Baltic-)Finnic subbranch of the Finno-Ugric languages. In 2003, the number of Finnish speakers in Finland was 4.8 million. Finnish has 8 vowel and 13 consonant phonemes, /i e æ y ø u o a/ and /p t k d s h v j l r m n /. Finnish orthography is among the most efficient in the world; it is almost perfectly phonemic. Finnish is a suffixing language with an elaborate morphology. Nominals (nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals) are inflected for number, case, and possessive. Case marking has an important role in Finnish syntax. Word order is relative free.