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White Guard (Finland)

White Guard (Finland)

The White Guards is one translation of the Finnish term Suojeluskunta (plural: Suojeluskunnat, Finland-Swedish: Skyddskår) that has received many different translations to English, for instance: Security Guard, Civil Guard, National Guard, White Militia, Defence Corps, Protection Guard, Protection Corps and Protection Militia. These White Guards constituted the bulk of the victorious White Army during the Civil War in Finland (1918), and also the main forces of the Lapua Movement's failed coup d'état, the Mäntsälä Rebellion (1932). Similar paramilitary militias existed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, i.e. in lands like Finland being under Russian sovereignty until the end of World War I. These militias didn't cease to exist until World War II, partly evolving towards Home Guards. The phenomenon should be distinguished from the Freikorps established in Germany after her defeat in the first world war, although some similarities exist. The following text intends only to cover the situation in Finland.

Historical context

(See also: Civil War in Finland) Tensions during Russia's failed war against Japan in 1905 led to empire-wide civil unrest, known to Soviet historians as the Revolution of 1905. In Finland the unrest was expressed as a General Strike, during which "Red" (Socialist) "Protection Guards of Workers" were organized, but also "White" (anti-Socialist) "Security Guards". The White and Red Guards were typically disguised as fire-brigades, a matter of great national concern in Finland. The first violent clash between Red and White Guards occurred in July 1906 in Helsinki, but the renewed Russian oppression meant a common enemy, meaning serious conflicts would wait until after the February Revolution in Russia 1917, when tensions over issues such as Parliamentarism, land reform and democratization of municipal elections, between a Socialist majority in Finland's Parliament and Cabinet, and the non-Socialist minority supported by Kerensky's revolutionary Provisional Government in Russia, led to increased polarization, strikes and some political violence. "Red Guards" were set up in some towns, as the Police in Finland was virtually abolished by the Provisional Government of Russia, although few Red Guards were established before November due to resistance from the Social Democratic leadership. In this situation some of the old fire-brigades were revived simply as an answer on insecurity and lawlessness, particularly in the rural countryside where the strike-connected violence actually was most intense. Suojeluskunnat were organized by leaders of the local societies, that was usually Conservative academics and industrialists, but "the Reds" were often collectively invited through their employers or their local Labor Union. New elections for Finland was announced by the Russian government, and the Left lost their absolute majority in the Parliament. The February Revolution, and even more so Lenin's Bolshevist October Revolution, ignited hopes also in Finland. The polarization and mutual fear between Leftists and Rightists in Finland had increased dramatically. About 30 political assassinations were reported. Subsequently a pure non-Socialist cabinet was appointed which, after the Bolshevists had seized power in Russia, felt squezed between increasingly revolutionary Socialists at home and aggressive Bolshevists in Saint Petersburg, proximate to Finland's border in South-East. Numerous Russian troops stationed in Finland made bad things worse, as they too burned with revolutionary frenzy, which they called their "svoboda" - their freedom. Their svoboda appeared to the Finns as the Russian military going out of control. They were intoxicated, they looted, they acted violently and they executed their officers. And on top of all this: a General Strike in Finland.

The White Guards in the Civil War

The Senate, led by the national hero Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, proposed a Declaration of Independence, which the Parliament adopted on December 6th, 1917. Declaring independence is one thing, exercizing control over the territory is another. Svinhufvud's "White Senate" had yet nothing but the "White Guards" to rely on. The 42,500 Russian soldiers had to be disarmed and sent back to Russia, and the "Red Guards" had to be kept in check. Unfortunately the necessary confidence had disappeared. The Civil War in Finland was ultimately ignited, when Svinhufvud's Senate on January 13th, 1918, was authorized by the Parliament to organize a Police force of the Suojeluskunnat. Soon the Senate asked general Mannerheim to form a new Finnish army on the basis on the Suojeluskunta militia, which already had begun in small scale to disarm the Russian garrisons - at the same time intending to stop the flow of weapons to the Red Guards. On January 18 1918, a rival Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic was declared with the support of the Red Guards. Neither the Red Guards, nor the White, were trained for combat. A structure of the armies had to be built in extreme haste. The White Army profitized on the Finnish Jaeger troops (2,000 man) able to act as instructors and officers, on volunteers from Sweden (1,200 man, of whom a large part officers), and on Finnish officers from the Russian Tsarist units, who returned home after the October Revolution. The White Army could use confiscated Russian weapons, and weapons delivered by Germany. The Red Army got weapons from Bolshevist Russia, and had initially more men in arms, but lacked instructors and officers.

The White Guards after the Civil War

The defeat of the Red Army, after four months of bitter Civil War, made the White Guards recognized as one of the key agents in the victory. In reality, German troops had made a necessary contribution to the Whites' victory, but for the sake of National Pride, it was important to stress the importance of the White Guards, the basis of the White Army, and of the Finnish Jaegers, the Army's elite. The Civil War erupted in a time when Finland was focusing on the Russian threat: Russia had tried to russify Finland for 20 years, White Russia wanted to limit Finland's autonomy, Russian soldiers were the closest threat, and Russian Bolsheviks were perceived as the most dangerous. In this situation, it was easy for large parts of the Finnish public to assume that the Civil War had been The War of Liberation from Bolshevist Russia, and consequently perceiving the Reds as traitors. Germany's defeat in the World War, half a year after the Civil War, followed by soured relations with Sweden, having turned Socialist, particularly in connection with Åland's attempted cessession from Finland, made it even more natural to talk quietly about the foreign (i.e. Russian, German, and Swedish) contributions to the White victory. The White Guards were accordingly depicted as Finland's freedom fighters. The local White Guards function in the following 20 years - up to the Winter War - was a mixture of Veteran Corps and Home Guards. They also sponsored numerous sport competitions and promoted voluntary national defence. In Winter War members of the Guard provided the fourth of the manpower of the field army, the contribution made more important as they were the best trained and equipped personnel as they had had to purchase their own rifle and overcoat during their membership of the Guard. The frosty relations between White Guards and Socialists started to ease during 1930s. During 1920s Socialists had demanded the White Guards be demobilized, but as Guard leadership and overwhelming majority of the members remained loyal to government during Mäntsälä rebellion, the demands were moderated to making Guards official part of the army. The rift was ultimately healed during the Winter War, when leadership of the Guard and the Social Democratic Party issued a joined statement February 15, 1940, where Guard leadership recommended local Guards to recruit Socialists and Party leadership recommended it's members to join Guards. After the Continuation War, the Finnish White Guards were disbanded in 1944, as per demands by the Soviet Union.

Finnish language

Finnish () is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92%) and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is also an official language in Finland and an official minority language in Sweden in the form of standard Finnish as well as Meänkieli. Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is classified as an agglutinative language. It modifies the forms of both noun and adjective depending on their roles in the sentence. It has a reputation for being difficult to understand and learn. This is mostly because there are few languages closely related to it, making the vocabulary unfamiliar.

History

It is believed that the Baltic Finnic languages evolved from a proto-Finnic language, from which Sami was separated around 1500-1000 BCE. It has been suggested that this proto-Finnic had three dialects: northern, southern and eastern. The Baltic Finnic languages separated around the 1st century, but kept on influencing each other. Therefore, the Eastern Finnish dialects are genetically Eastern proto-Finnic, with many Eastern features, and the Southwestern Finnish dialects have many genuine influences. The first written form of Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop in the 16th century. He based his orthography on Swedish, German, and Latin. Later the written form was revised by many people. The Reformation marked the real beginning of writing in Finnish. In the 16th century major literary achievements were composed in Finnish by people like Paavali Juusten, Erik Sorolainen, and Jaakko Finno, as well as Agricola himself. In the 17th century books were written in Finland in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Estonian, Latvian, German, and Swedish. However, the most important books were still written in Latin. Finnish and Swedish were small languages of lesser importance. Finnish had a larger array of different fricatives, but has lost most of them, leaving /s/, /h/ and medially /ts/. The process can be described as finding a similar-sounding non-fricative phoneme. Fricative deletion has removed the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/, e.g. parghutin [parɣuttiin] becoming modern paruttiin. The same may be also be found debuccalized, e.g. lughun → luvun. Assibilation together with vocalization has transformed the voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/, e.g. illative ending [ʝn] becoming -han in maahan but -eseen in huoneeseen. Postalveolar /ʃ/ has become /h/, or /s/.

Agricola's work

The basis for the numerous conventions in the Finnish standard language is found in Agricola's work, particularly with respect to spelling. Agricola's language was based on Western Finnish, thus that phonology found its way into the standard Finnish spelling. Agricola used dh or d to represent the voiced dental fricative (English th in this) and tz or z to represent the unvoiced dental fricative (the th in thin). Later, when these sounds disappeared or changed in the different dialects, no one knew how to pronounce them. (Today, the sound is only in a few particular accents in Western Finland.) However, the spelling remained unchanged, so the standard language pronunciation of d and z was loaned from German (z = and d = ), producing the "soft D" problem (see Finnish phonology). Later, z came to be written ts. In the standard language, remained [d], e.g. sydän. In the eastern part of Finland, became j, v, or disappeared. In the west, it became r, l or d. The sound became ht or tt (e.g. meþþä → mehtä, mettä) in the east and some Western dialects, but became ts in the standard language and many Western dialects (meþþä → metsä). Agricola made up some words during translation of the New Testament. Some of these words are still in use, e.g. armo "mercy", vanhurskas "righteous". Agricola used about 8500 words and 60% of them are still in use. Either ch, c or h were used for the voiceless velar fricative (the ach-laut, ). In modern Finnish, the difference between and has been lost in phonemic terms; while velar friction might appear in 'h', spelling does not reflect it. For example, Agricola's spelling techtin becomes modern tehtiin. Agricola used gh or g to represent the voiced velar fricative. This sound was later lost and also suppressed in spelling, except if it appeared intervocalically, when it became 'v'.

Classification

Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family (which also includes Hungarian). Finnish is a synthetic language of the agglutinative type. Some fusion is found in spoken Finnish. It modifies noun and verb forms depending on their role in the sentence. Among the grammatical features that demonstrate Finnish's affiliation with the Finno-Ugric Languages are: 1) absence of grammatical gender (the same Finnish pronoun hän denotes both he and she), 2) absence of articles ("a" and "the" in English), 3) long words due to the structure of the language, 4) numerous grammatical cases, 5) personal possession expressed with suffixes, 6) postpositions in addition to prepositions, and 7) no equivalent of the verb "to have." There are various theories about the time and place where Finno-Ugric originated; according to the most recent theory Hungarian and Finnish are divided by 6000 years of separate development. Speakers of a Finno-Ugrian language have been living in the region of current Finland since at least 3000 BC. Finnish borrowed several words from other Finnic languages such as Vepsian, Vote and Lude. Some grammatical features were also borrowed. More recently, Finnish has borrowed from Swedish and the other Germanic languages.

Geographic distribution

Finnish is spoken by about 6 million people, mainly in Finland; there are small Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia and Estonia; in addition, a few hundred thousand emigrated Finns live in Sweden, and also in North America there remain communities of Finnish-speaking emigrants, notably in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Official status

Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish, spoken by a 5% minority) and thus an official language of the European Union. It enjoys the status of an official minority language in Sweden.

Dialects

The Finnish dialects are divided into two distinct groups, the Western dialects and the Eastern dialects. [http://www.internetix.ofw.fi/opinnot/opintojaksot/8kieletkirjallisuus/aidinkieli/murteet/] The dialects are entirely mutually intelligible and characterized only by minor changes in vowels, diphthongs and rhythm, and as such, they are better classified as accents. For the most part, the dialects operate on the same phonology, grammar and vocabulary. There are only marginal examples of sounds or grammatical constructions isolated to some dialect, not found in standard Finnish. Two examples are the voiced dental fricative found in Rauma dialect and the Eastern excessive case. The classification of closely related dialects spoken outside of Finland is a politically sensitive issue that has been more or less controversial since Finland's independence in 1917. The speakers of Karelian language in Russia and of Meänkieli in Sweden are typically considered oppressed minorities. Karelian is different enough from standard Finnish to have its own orthography. Meänkieli is a northern dialect, entirely intelligible and interchangeable with any other Finnish dialect that got the status as a minority language in Sweden for historical and political reasons.

Western dialects

The South-West dialects (lounaismurteet) are spoken in Finland Proper and Satakunta. Their typical feature is abbreviation of word-final vowels, and in many respects, they resemble . The Tavastian dialects (hämäläismurteet) are spoken in Tavastia. They are closest to the standard language, but feature some slight vowel changes, such as the opening of diphthong-final vowels (tie → tiä, miekka → miakka, kuolisi → kualis). The Southern Ostrobothnian dialects (eteläpohjalaiset murteet) are spoken in Southern Ostrobothnia. Their most notable feature is pronunciation of 'd' as a tapped or even fully trilled /r/. The Middle and North Ostrobothnia dialects (keski- ja pohjoispohjalaiset murteet) which are spoken in Central and Northern Ostrobothnia. The Far-Northern dialects (peräpohjalaiset murteet) are spoken in Lapland. These dialects spoken in the western parts of Lapland are recognizable by addition of extraneous 'h' sounds into positions where they are not found in other dialect. One of the Far-Northern dialects, Meänkieli, which is spoken on the Swedish side of the border that was created in 1809, is taught in some Swedish schools as a distinct standardized language. The categorization of Meänkieli as a separate language is controversial among the Finns, who see no linguistic criteria, only political reasons, for treating Meänkieli differently than other dialects of Finnish. The Ruija dialect (Ruijan murre) is spoken in Finnmark (Finnish Ruija), in Norway. It is remnant from Finnish emigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Eastern dialects

The Eastern dialects consist of the widespread Savonian dialects (savolaismurteet) spoken in Savo and near-by areas. The South-Eastern dialects (kaakkoismurteet) are spoken in South Karelia, on the Karelian Isthmus and in Ingria. They retain the phonetic palatalization found in all Uralic languages except Western Finnish. Per Finnish orthography, this is denoted with a 'j', e.g. vesj, cf. standard vesi. Usually, a distinction is made between a more distantly related Karelian language that is spoken in those parts of Karelia that never have been ruled from the West. However, the terms Karelian and Karelian dialects are often used without distinctions, primarily denoting dialects spoken on the Karelian Isthmus and n Ingria, i.e. in the Saint Petersburg area, but in a way that diplomatically may leave open for interpretation the question of whether the speaker considers the Karelian language a dialect of Finnish or not. Hence, the many refugees from Finnish Karelia, that were evacuated during World War II and resettled all over Finland, speak Savonian dialects, although their dialects in everyday speech often are referred to as Karelian.

Formal and informal Finnish

The Finnish linguistic situation is to some extent comparable to that of much of the Arabic speaking world, where Classical Arabic is used in official and religious speech and in the literature, whereas colloquial forms of Arabic are used in everyday conversation and in personal letters. There are two main varieties of Finnish used throughout the country. One is the "standard language" (yleiskieli), and the other is the "spoken language" puhekieli. The standard language is used in formal situations like church sermons, political speeches and newscasts. Its written form, the "book language" (kirjakieli), is used nearly in all of the written texts, not always excluding even the dialogue of common people in popular prose. The term "standard language" does not actually exactly coincide with the term yleiskieli, because the definition is that yleiskieli lacks the everyday colloquial register. The spoken language, on the other hand, is the main variety of Finnish to be used in popular TV and radio shows, at workplaces and it is sometimes preferred to speaking a dialect in personal communication. Also, the standard language is quite rare in personal letters and in conversations on the Internet, where strict "correctness" is not in force. The differences between the two are comparable to differences between Standard English and some English ethnolect. The spoken language has mostly developed naturally from earlier forms of Finnish, and spread from main cultural and political centers. The book language, however, has always been a consciously constructed medium for literature. It preserves grammatical patterns that have mostly vanished from the colloquial varieties and, as its main application is writing, it features complex syntactic patterns that are not easy to handle when used in speech. The spoken language develops significantly faster, and the grammatical and phonological simplifications includes also the most common pronouns and suffixes, which sums up to frequent but modest differences. Some sound changes have been left out from the formal language, such as the irregularization of some common verbs by assimilation, e.g. tule- → tuu-. Finnish children usually acquire the knowledge of the standard language when educated in school, but many children who read much learn it as their written "first language". Written language certainly still exerts a considerable influence upon the spoken word, due to the fact that illiteracy is nonexistent and that many Finns are avid readers. In fact, it is still not entirely uncommon to meet people who "talk like a book" (puhuvat kirjakieltä), although this habit is perceived as typical of "old elementary school teachers" and somewhat pedantic. More common is the intrusion of typically bookish constructions into a basically colloquial discourse, as a kind of loan or quote from written or formal Finnish. It should also be noted that it is quite common to hear bookish and polished speech on radio or TV, and the constant exposure to such carefully prepared language tends to lead to the adoption of bookish constructions even in everyday language. However, a foreign learner of Finnish who aims to live and work in Finland should try to acquire a grasp of the most common colloquial reductions in speech, because anybody not conversant with the talk of the street would feel somewhat at a loss in a relaxed speech situation, even if s/he were entirely able to understand the formal language of the news media. The orthography of the informal language follows that of the formal language. However, sometimes sandhi may be transcribed, especially internal sandhi, e.g. menenpä → menempä. This never takes place in formal language; some people believe that the sandhi should not be even pronounced in formal language.

Examples

:formal language — colloquial language :he menevät — ne menee "they go" (loss of distinction of animacy) :onko(s) teillä — onks teil(lä) "do you have?" (vowel deletion) :me emme sano — me ei sanota or mei sanota "we don't say" (notice: fusion of me ei transcribed) :(minun) kirjani — mu(ŋ) kirja "my book" (notice: sandhi n+k → ŋk transcribed) :kuusikymmentäviisi — kuus(kyt)viis "sixty-five" :tulen — tuun "I'm coming" (irregular verb) :punainen — punane(n) "red" (unstressed diphthong becomes a very short vowel) :korjannee — kai korjaa "probably will fix" :mentyämme — kumme oltii(m) menty "after we had gone" (notice: sandhi nm → mm transcribed) :Note that there are noticable differences within dialects. These examples are mostly from Helsinki dialect.

Phonology

Characteristic features of Finnish (common to other Finno-Ugric languages) are vowel harmony and an agglutinative morphology; due to the extensive use of the latter, words can be quite long. The main stress is always on the first syllable. There are eight vowels, whose lexical and grammatical role is highly important, and which are unusually strictly controlled, so that there is almost no allophony. Vowels are as follows, followed by IPA when not identical: a , e, i, o, u, y, ä , ö . The vowels a, o, u have front counterparts ä, ö, y in the vowel harmony, where i and e are neutral. One phoneme is the chroneme, such that Finnish appears to have long and short vowels and consonants; thus, long vowels behave as vowels followed by a consonant, not as lengthened vowels. The quality of long vowels mostly overlaps with the quality of short vowels, with the exception of u, which is centralized with respect to uu. There are eighteen phonemic diphthongs; just as vowels, diphthongs do not have allophony. Finnish has a consonant inventory of small to moderate size, where voicing is not distinctive, and there are only glottal and unvoiced alveolar fricatives. Almost all consonants are either alveolar or pronounced such that the tongue doesn't have to move away from the alveolar ridge. Consonants are as follows, where consonants in parenthesis are found only in a few recent loans. # is the equivalent of under weakening consonant gradation, and thus occurs only medially, or in non-native words; it is actually more of a alveolar tap rather than a true voiced stop, and the dialectal realization varies wildly; see main article. # The glottal stop is not a phoneme, but is found as a result of lenition of between a long vocalic sound and a short vowel in words such as ruo'on ← ruoko. It can also be analyzed as a hiatus. # The short velar nasal is an allophone of in , and the long velar nasal , written ng, is the equivalent of under weakening consonant gradation (type of lenition) and thus occurs only medially. Almost all consonant have phonemic geminated forms. These are independent, but occur only medially when phonemic. Independent consonant clusters are not allowed in native words, except for a small set of two-consonant syllable coda, e.g. 'rs' in torstai. However, due to a number of loanwords using them, e.g. strutsi "ostrich", Finnish speakers can pronounce them, even if it is somewhat awkward. As a Finno-Ugric language, it is somewhat special in three respects: noninitial labial vowels, loss of fricatives and palatalization. An interesting feature of Fennic phonology is the development of labial vowels in non-initial syllables. Proto-Uralic had only 'a' and 'i' and their vowel harmonic allophones in non-initial syllables, but modern Finnish allows other vowels in non-initial syllables, albeit they are uncommon compared to 'a', 'ä' and 'i'. Palatalization is characteristic to Finno-Ugric languages, but standard Finnish has lost it. The palatalization is replaced by ; the sound has become independent, in spelling as in pronunciation; it becomes in a word-final position. The Eastern dialects and the Karelian language retain palatalization. For example, the Karelian word d'uuri , with a palatalized , is reflected by juuri in Finnish; and Savo dialect vesj is vesi in standard Finnish. Finnish has only two fricatives, namely and . All other fricatives are recognized as foreign, of which Finnish speakers can usually reliably distinguish and .

Grammar

The morphosyntactic alignment is nominative-accusative; but, there are two object cases: accusative and partitive. The contrast between the two is telicity, where accusative denotes actions completed as intended (Ammuin hirven "I shot the elk dead"), and partitive denotes incomplete actions (Ammuin hirveä "I shot at the elk"). Often this is confused with perfectivity, but the only element of perfectivity there is in Finnish is that there are some perfective verbs. Transitivity is distinguished by different verbs for transitive and intransitive, e.g. ratkaista "to solve something" vs. ratketa "to be solved by itself". There are several frequentative and momentane verb categories. Verbs gain personal suffixes for each person; these suffixes are grammatically more important than pronouns, which may be dropped. The infinitive is not the uninflected form but has a suffix -ta or -da; the closest one to an uninflected form is the third person singular imperative. There are four persons, first, second, third and impersonal (often called "passive"). There are four tenses, namely present, past, perfect and pluperfect; the system mirrors the Germanic system. The future tense is not needed due to context and the telic contrast. For example, luen kirjan "I read a book (completely)" indicates a future, when luen kirjaa "I read a book (not yet complete)" indicates present. Nouns may be suffixed with the markers for the aforementioned accusative case and partitive case, the genitive case, eight different locatives, and a few other cases. The case marker must be added not only to the main noun, but also to its modifiers; e.g. suure+ssa talo+ssa, literally "big-in house-in". Possession is marked with a possessive suffix; separate possessive pronouns are unknown. Pronouns gain suffixes just as other nouns.

Lexicon

:See the lists of Finnish words and words of Finnish origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project. Finnish extensively employs regular agglutination. It has a smaller core vocabulary than, for example, English, and uses derivative suffixes to a greater extent. As an example, take the word kirja "a book", from which one can form derivatives kirjain "a letter" (of the alphabet), kirje "a piece of correspondence, a letter", kirjasto "a library", kirjailija "an author", kirjallisuus "literature", kirjoittaa "to write", kirjoittaja "a writer", kirjallinen "something in written form", kirjata "to write down, register, record", kirjasin "a font", and others. Here are some of the more common such suffixes. Which of each pair used depends on the word being suffixed using the rules of vowel harmony.
- -ja/jä : agent (one who does) (e. g. lukea "to read" → lukija "reader")
- -lainen/läinen: inhabitant of (either noun or adjective). Englanti "England" → englantilainen "English person or thing"; Helsinki → helsinkiläinen "person from Helsinki".
- -sto/stö: collection of. For example: kirja "a book" → kirjasto "a library"; laiva "a ship" → laivasto "navy, fleet".
- -in: instrument or tool. For example: kirjata "to book, to file" → kirjain "a letter" (of the alphabet); vatkata "to whisk" → vatkain "a whisk, mixer".
- -uri/yri: an agent or instrument (kaivaa "to dig" → kaivuri "a digging machine"; laiva "a ship" → laivuri "shipper, shipmaster".
- -os/ös: result of some action (tulla "to come" → tulos "result, outcome"; tehdä "to do" → teos "a piece of work").
- -ton/tön: lack of something, "un-", "-less" (onni "happiness" → onneton "unhappy"; koti "home" → koditon "homeless").
- -llinen: having (the quality of) something (lapsi "a child" → lapsellinen "childish"; kauppa "a shop, commerce" → kaupallinen "commercial").
- -kas/käs: similar to -llinen (itse "self" → itsekäs "selfish"; neuvo "advice" → neuvokas "resourceful").
- -va/vä: doing or having something (taitaa "to be able" (old-fashioned), "might" (modern modal auxiliary) → taitava "skillful"; johtaa "to lead" → johtava "leading").
- -la/lä: a place related to the main word (kana "a hen" → kanala "a henhouse"; pappi "a priest" → pappila "a parsonage"). Verbal suffixes are extremely diverse; several frequentatives and momentanes differentiating causative, volitional-unpredictable and anticausative are found, often combined with each other. For example, hypätä "to jump", hypäyttää "to make someone jump once", hyppyytellä "to make someone jump repeatedly", hypähtää "to jump suddenly" (in anticausative meaning), hypellä "to jump around repeatedly". Often the diversity and compactness of this agglutination is illustrated with juoksentelisinkohan "I wonder if I should run around aimlessly".

Borrowing

Over the course of many centuries, the Finnish language has borrowed a great many words from a wide variety of languages. Indeed, some estimates put the core Finno-Ugric vocabulary surviving in Finnish at only around 300 word roots. (However, due to neologisms, the plain figure is misleading.) The first loan words into Finno-Ugric languages seem to come from very early Indo-European languages, and later mainly from Indo-Iranian, Turkic, Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic languages. The usual example quoted is kuningas "king" from Germanic
- kuningaz, but another example is äiti "mother", from Gothic eiþai, which is interesting because borrowing of close-kinship vocabulary is a rare phenomenon. The original Finnish word for mother is emo, which still exists, though its use is now confined to animal species, as is the variant emä. This latter is also used in compounds in a figurative sense, such as emäalus "mothership", emolevy "motherboard" and emävale "huge lie" ("a mother of all lies"). There are other close-kinship words that are loaned from Baltic and Germanic languages (morsian "bride", armas "dear"). More recently, Swedish has been a prolific source of borrowings. Present-day Finland belonged to the kingdom of Sweden from the 12th century and was ceded to Russia in 1809, becoming autonomous. The upper class held Swedish as their primary language even after this, because Russia did not have a written law nor legal bureaucracies and left the Swedish-originated system mostly intact. When Finnish was accepted as an official language, it gained only legal "equal status" with Swedish, which persists even today. It is still the case today that about 6% of Finnish nationals, the Finland-Swedes, have Swedish as their mother tongue. During the period of autonomy, Russian did not gain much ground as a language of the people or the government. Nevertheless, a range of words were subsequently acquired from Russian (especially in older Helsinki slang) but not to the same extent as with Swedish. In all these cases, borrowing has been partly a result of geographical proximity. Typical Russian loanwords are old or very old, thus hard to recognize as such, and concern everyday concepts, e.g. papu "bean", sini "(n.) blue" and pappi "priest". For example, Raamattu ("Bible") is a loanword from Russian, also other religious words are loaned from Russian. This is mainly believed to be result of trade with Novogorod 9th century and so on and the Orthodox converting in 13th century. Most recently, and with increasing impact, English has been the source of new loanwords in Finnish. Unlike previous "geographical" borrowing, the influence of English is largely "cultural" and reaches Finland by many routes including: international business; music; film (except for the very young, foreign films are shown subtitled); literature; and, of course, the Internet — this is now probably the most important source of all non-face-to-face exposure to English. The importance of English as the language of global commerce has led many non-English companies, including Finland's Nokia, to adopt English as their official operating language. Recently, it has been observed that English borrowings are not only ousting existing Finnish words, but also previous borrowings, for example the switch from treffailla "to date" (from Swedish, träffa) to deittailla from English "to go for a date". Calques from English are also found, e.g kovalevy (hard disk). The replacement the impersonal (passiivi) with the English-style "you-impersonal", e. g. sä et voi "you cannot", instead of ei voi is said to be English influence, but it may be actually an older phenomenon, since it appears to have appeared in Karelian dialects already in the beginning of the 20th century. However, this does not mean that Finnish is threatened by English. Borrowing is normal language evolution, and neologisms are coined actively not only by the government, but also by the media. Moreover, Finnish and English have a considerably different grammar, phonology and phonotactics, discouraging direct borrowing. English loan words in Finnish slang include pleikkari "PlayStation", hodari "hot dog", hedari "headache" (native word being päänsärky, and native slang words including jysäri).

Neologisms

Some modern terms have been synthesised rather than borrowed, for example: :puhelin "telephone" (literally: "thing for speaking") :tietokone "computer" (literally: "knowledge machine") :levyke "diskette" (from levy "disc" + a diminutive -ke) :sähköposti "email" (literally: "electrical mail") The generic term for a diskette is levyke, but colloquially diskettes are referred to as lerppu (the now obsolete 5¼-inch floppy, derived from the word floppy) and korppu (the 3½-inch floppy, Finnish word for "rusk" or "biscuit" that obviously fits the description of the more rigid diskette and nicely resembles lerppu). The colloquial word romppu for the CD-ROM was invented in a contest by the magazine Suomen Kuvalehti when CD-ROM drives were becoming common in PCs in the early 1990s. This word led quickly into another neologism, romputin (CD-ROM drive)

Finnish loans to other languages

Orthography

The Finnish orthography is morphemic, and the morphemic notation is built upon the phonetic principle: with just a few subtle exceptions, within a single morpheme, each phoneme (distinct sound) of the language is represented by exactly one grapheme (independent letter), and each grapheme represents exactly one phoneme, if the morpheme is pronounced in isolation. This makes the language easy for its speakers to spell, and facilitates learning to read and write. Some orthographical notes:
- Long vowels and consonants are represented by double occurrences of the relevant graphemes. This causes no confusion, and permits these sounds to be written without having to nearly double the size of the alphabet to accommodate separate graphemes for long sounds.
- The n in nk is a velar nasal, like in English. As an exception to the phonetic principle, there is no g in ng, which is a long velar nasal as in English singalong.
- The grapheme h occurring before a consonant sounds slightly harder (initially breathy voiced, then voiceless) than when occurring before a vowel.
- Sandhi is not transcribed; the spelling of morphemes is immutable, e.g. tulen+pa /tulempa/.
- Some consonants (v, j, d) and all consonants occurring in (always medial) clusters do not have distinctive length, and consequently, their allophonic variation is not indicated in spelling, e.g. raajaan /raajaan/ vs. raijaan /raijjaan/, or katko /katko/ vs. metsä /mettsä/.
- Pre-1900's texts and personal names use w for v. Both correspond to the same phoneme, the labiodental approximant , a v without the fricative ("hissing") quality of the English v. The letters ä [æ] and ö [ø], although drawn as umlauted a and o, are nevertheless considered independent graphemes. An appropriate parallel from the Latin alphabet are the characters C and G (uppercase), which historically have a closer kinship than many other characters (G is a derivation of C) but are considered distinct letters. How the Finnish letters ä and ö differ from their Germanic (German, Swedish) counterparts:
- The Finnish sounds ä and ö, and their long counterparts ää and öö, are grammatically independent, often distinguishing unrelated words, e.g. talli "stables" vs. tälli "punch". German umlauts often correlate with distinctions of tense, mood, or plurality such as Rad/Räder for "wheel/wheels".
- The pronunciation of ä and ö in Finnish does not change in diphtongs, or when followed by r, as it sometimes does in Swedish and German. The letters ä and e are not phonetically equivalent in Finnish.
- The letter ä is very common, both by its own merits and by phonotactical reasons. Vowel harmony requires it for several grammatical endings such as the partitive case -ta/-tä, and it is also found in its long form, sometimes multiple times in a single word while contrasting with other forms, e.g. pää-äänenkannattaja "chief organ", tällä päivämäärällä "on this date"
- In German, umlauts are replaceable: ä may be written ae and ö as oe. This is not possible in Finnish, as ae and oe are vowel combinations of their own right, with very different pronunciations. Minimal pairs exist between ä/ö and ae/oe, e.g. hän "s/he" vs. haen "I seek". The custom of replacing umlauts with oe or ae can produce silly and unpronounceable results, for example in TV broadcasts of sporting events, when applied to Finnish names like Eduard Hämäläinen -> "Eduard Haemaelaeinen". The preferred method, if äs or ös are not available, is to use simple a or o as in Kimi Räikkönen -> "Kimi Raikkonen".
- Like in Swedish, the Finnish letters ä and ö are alphabetized as independent characters added to the end of the alphabet; the Finnish alphabet ends with "X Y Z Å Ä Ö". In German, the umlauted vowels are alphabetized together with their mother-characters, which is convenient given their grammatical role in German. Finnish does not use the visually similar diaeresis notation, as used in French and English words such as coördinate or naïve. In such situations either hyphen (when the vowels belong in different syllables) or double vowel (when the question is about long vowel) is used: koordinaatti, naiivi. For technical reasons or convenience, the graphemes sh and zh are often used in quickly or less carefully written texts instead of š and ž. This is a deviation from the phonetic principle, and as such is liable to cause confusion. In practice however, these letters are used nowhere else than in transcriptions (e. g. šakki, Tšekki, Saakašvili), so the damage is minimal. Finnish does not use the sounds z, š or ž, but for the sake of exactitude, they can be included in spelling. (The recommendation cites the Russian play Hovanshtshina as an example.) Many speakers pronounce all of them s, or distinguish only between s and š, because Finnish has no voiced sibilants.

Bibliography

English books

- Finnish for Foreigners 1 (Maija-Hellikki Aaltio: ISBN 951-1-08145-4) :This is the first of 2 volumes, each of which has an associated exercises book. There is also a reader. :Volume 1 is grammar based, but takes things in nice small steps, so it isn't intimidating. It generally teaches the written language, but does point out the main differences in the spoken language. By the end of volume 1 you would have quite a good grasp of the language for everyday purposes.
- Teach Yourself Finnish (Terttu Leney: ISBN 0-340-56174-2) :Quite good: the pace is quite fast as it covers all of FFF1 and some of FFF2, and includes exercises. :There are a couple of irritations: the chapters are long and rambling without any clear focus, and the vocabularies don't always contain all the words used in the dialogs.
- Colloquial Finnish (Daniel Abondolo: ISBN 0-415-11389-X) :This book tries to cover most of what you need to know in 300 pages: from complete beginner to familiarity with both the written and spoken languages. It uses an original approach to the grammar which is challenging, but well worth tackling. :The book is intended for beginners willing to invest some time and energy into learning Finnish, as well as for those who have a fair grasp of the language already, but would like to improve their understanding of more colloquial aspects of Finnish — aspects largely neglected in other grammars. The spoken language dialogues are especially useful, as they let you know what you can expect to hear, rather than what you will read in the newspaper. The grammatical explanations are built around the dialogues, not cloned from previous grammars.
- Finnish: An Essential Grammar (Fred Karlsson: ISBN 0-415-20705-3) :This book is much like Colloquial Finnish but deals mainly with the written form of the language (although pronunciation is dealt with). It is not laid out in a lesson-based format, so is suitable for those who are familiar with the language but need to consolidate their grammar, although 'no prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader'. If you are a beginner, use this as a reference to back up your course book.

Basic greetings

- hyvää huomenta - good morning
- hyvää päivää - good afternoon (or morning)
- hyvää iltaa - good evening
- hyvää yötä - good night
- terve! - hello!
- hei! / moi! - hi!
- näkemiin - good bye
- hauska tavata! - nice to meet you
- kiitos - thank you
- kuinka voitte ? - how are you?
- kiitos hyvin - I'm fine, thank you

Important words

- kyllä - yes
- ei - no
- minä, sinä, hän - I, you, he/she
- me, te, he - we, you, they
- yksi, kaksi, kolme - 1,2,3
- neljä, viisi kuusi - 4,5,6
- seitsemän, kahdeksan - 7,8
- yhdeksän, kymmenen - 9,10
- sata, tuhat - 100, 1000
- anteeksi - sorry

Finnish books

- Aletaan (Eila Hämäläinen & Salli-Marja Bessonoff: ISBN 951-45-4895-7) [tr. Let's begin]
- Jatketaan (Eila Hämäläinen & Salli-Marja Bessonoff: ISBN 951-45-4872-8) [tr. Let's continue] :Together, these books and their associated exercise books form a fairly complete course in Finnish, roughly equivalent to the Finnish for Foreigners books. However, the production quality is rather spare: typewriter font throughout and poor layout. This book is not of so much use without a teacher.
- Kato hei! (Maarit Berg & Leena Silfverberg: ISBN 951-792-028-8) :It is an attempt to cover how Finnish is actually spoken. However, it is not designed to teach Finnish, and pulls no punches about the language, so the reader needs a good grasp to make use of it. There are no exercises. This is one of the several stools between which Colloquial Finnish fell!
- Tarkista tästä! (Hannele Jönsson-Korhola & Leila White: ISBN 951-792-007-5) [tr. Look for it here!] :Finnish relies heavily on changing the endings of words to indicate their role in a sentence. For example, there is one verb which means both "lend" or "borrow", but the direction is indicated by the ending of the person you are lending to or borrowing from. This book contains the rules for this and hundreds of similar situations.
- Suomen kielioppia ulkomaalaisille (Leila White: ISBN 951-8905-65-7) [tr. Finnish Grammar for Foreigners] :A comprehensive treatment of Finnish grammar, concentrating on the written language. Useful for reference only.
- Stadin snadi slangi (sanakirja) (Juhani Mäkelä: ISBN 951-0-22477-4) [tr. A little dictionary of city slang] :A Finnish-Helsinki-Finnish dictionary. Useful to residents.
- Suomea ennen ja nyt (Laila Lehikoinen: ISBN 951-8905-80-0) [tr. Finnish then and now] :A comprehensive coverage of the history of both written and spoken Finnish, including a detailed discussion of the regional variations found in the spoken language.

External links

- [http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=fin Finnish language on Ethnologue]
- [http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suomi/ Finnish grammar]
- [http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/Finnish.html The Finnish language --- a great list of resources]
- [http://www.internetix.fi/opinnot/opintojaksot/8kieletkirjallisuus/aidinkieli/murteet/ Finnish regional dialects]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Finnish-english/ Finnish - English Dictionary]: from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition.
- [http://www.tracetech.net/sanat/ English-Finnish-English Dictionary]
- [http://efe.scape.net/ Another English-Finnish-English Dictionary]
- [http://www.sprachprofi.de.vu/english/fn.htm Free online resources for learners]
- [http://www.lingsoft.fi/cgi-bin/fintwol FINTWOL - The most advanced morphological analyzer of Finnish]
- [http://www.wakkanet.fi/%7Epahio/esitteet.html «Tuuli» (Inflexion and Syntax of Finnish Verb – computer programme)]
- [http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/abc.html SFS 4600 Standard] - Orthography in Finnish
- [http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~hetahein/tiede/verbikaava.html The Finnish verb paradigm] - The Finnish verb paradigm (in Finnish)
- [http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html The 2,253 possible forms of the Finnish noun kauppa 'shop']
- [http://library.uncg.edu/news/nq-state.asp?dbstate=327 News and newspapers in the Finnish language]
- [http://iteslj.org/v/f/ English-Finnish vocabulary quizzes]
- [http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/fi.htm Finnish tongue twisters]
- [http://groups.msn.com/FinlandTravelClub/language.msnw Finland travel Club] Links about Finnish language Category:Agglutinative languages Category:Finnish language Category:Finno-Ugric languages Category:Languages of Finland Category:Languages of Sweden Category:Vowel harmony languages ko:핀란드어 ja:フィンランド語

Plural

Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. In the English language, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers. In English, nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives inflect for plurality. (See English plural.) In many other languages, for example German and the various Romance languages, articles and adjectives also inflect for plurality. For example, in the English sentence "the brown cats run," only the noun and verb are inflected; but in the French sentence "les chats bruns courent," every word (article, noun, adjective, and verb) is inflected. In languages such as Sanskrit, Icelandic, Biblical Hebrew and Inuktitut there is also a dual grammatical number (two objects). Some other grammatical numbers present in various languages include nullar (no objects), trial (three objects) and paucal (a few objects). In languages with dual, trial, or paucal numbers, plural refers to numbers higher than those (i.e. more than two, more than three, or many.) Some languages distinguish between a plural and a greater plural. A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for what we are discussing. It should also be noted that the distinction between the paucal and the plural and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion. For example, for oranges a few might mean less than ten, whereas for the population of a country a few might mean a few hundred thousand. The Austronesian language Sursurunga has singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural. Lihir, another Austronesian language, has singular, dual, trial, paucal, and plural. These are probably languages with the most complex number. Reports on existence of quadral (four) are considered false. However, numbers besides singular, plural, and to a lesser extent dual, are extremely rare. Furthermore, languages with noun classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all. They are likely to have plural personal pronouns though. Languages having only a singular and plural form may still differ in their treatment of zero. For example, in English, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, the plural form is used for zero or more than one, and the singular for one thing only. By contrast, in French and Brazilian Portuguese, the singular form is used for zero. Some languages, such as Latvian, have a special form--the nullar--for zero, as well as the singular and plural, as discussed above. Also, an interesting difference from Romance/Germanic languages is found in some Slavic and Baltic languages. Here, the final digits of the number determine its form. For example, Polish has singular and plural, and a special form for numbers where the last digit is 2,3 or 4, and the second last digit is not 1. Slovenian has one form for numbers congruent to 1 modulo 100, another for numbers congruent to 2 modulo 100, another for numbers congruent to either 3 or 4 modulo 100, and another form for all other numbers. In Croatian (in addition to the Polish 2,3,4), there is a plural for counting and a plural for not-counting. For example, there are two ways to say leaves: "lišće" is used in "Leaves are falling from the trees", but "listovi" is used in "Those are some beautiful leaves". The first plural is the more commonly used, and in general the two plurals are used with natural objects.

Sources

- Corbett, Greville. Number (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- [http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_mono/gettext.html#SEC150 GNU gettext utilities (section 10.2.5 - Additional functions for plural forms)] (Treatment of zero and the plurality based on the final digits) Category:Grammatical number simple:Plural

Finland-Swedish

Finland-Swedish is a general term for the closely related cluster of dialects of Swedish spoken in Finland by Finland-Swedes as a first language. For the most part, these dialects are mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish or can even be considered varieties of it. A common mistake made by many Swedes is to mistake Finland-Swedish for Swedish with a Finnish accent, something that can be a considerable source of frustration to most Finland-Swedes. Curiously enough, the percentually most Swedish speaking municipality in the world, Hammarland (96% as of 12.31.2004) (maybe Korsnäs (95,7%), resides in Finland. In spoken language, especially among young people in Finnish-dominated areas, Finnish loanwords, as well as calques from Finnish, are frequently incorporated. There are also some words in the Finland-Swedish that in Sweden would be considered slightly archaic. Some words from the field of government and public service that have been created in recent centuries do also differ, like also other new words, notably loanwords from English. Some specific dialects from Ostrobothnia are practically unintelligible to Swedish-speaking people in southern Finland. Swedish as spoken in Finland is regulated by the "Swedish Department" of the "Research Institute for the Languages of Finland". There is an officially stated aim that Finland-Swedish should remain close to the Swedish spoken in Sweden, thus the Swedish Department strongly advises against loanwords and calques from Finnish, which are often incomprehensible to Sweden-Swedes.

History

From the 16th century Swedish, rather than Finnish, was the main language of jurisdiction, administration and higher education in Finland. In 1892 Finnish and Swedish became official languages with equal status, and by the time of Finland's independence in 1917 Finnish clearly dominated in government and society. Finland has since then been a bilingual country with a Swedish-speaking minority (5.08% of Mainland Finland's population in 2003), speaking Finland-Swedish, living mostly in the coastal areas of southern, south-western, and western Finland. During the 20th century, the urbanization following the Industrial Revolution has led to large majorities of Finnish speakers in all major cities. The capital Helsingfors became the predominantly Finnish-speaking city Helsinki as early as around year 1900. A large and important part of the Finland-Swedes nevertheless live in the capital. The autonomous island-province of Åland is an exception, being monolingually Swedish-speaking according to international treaties. It is a matter of definition whether the Swedish dialects spoken on Åland are to be considered Finland-Swedish or not. Most Swedish-speaking Finns consider them to be closer to some of the dialects spoken in nearby parts of Sweden.

Sounds

With the exception of the dialect spoken in Ostrobothnia along the west coast, closer to the Gulf of Bothnia, Finland-Swedish are not particularly deviant from Central Swedish. The phonology is identical, but with slightly different vowel qualities. The phoneme /ʉ/ is more centralized and pronounced like , quite similar to the American English pronunciation of /u/ (as in moon). This should be compared to the Central Swedish , which is very close to the short vowel and is more rounded. The realization of the highly variable phoneme , is more frontal on the mainland and can vary between and while the realizations on Åland are more similar to the velar (and often distinctly labialized) in Sweden. is affricated into in all dialects. The tonal word accent, which distinguishes some minimal pairs in most dialects of Swedish and Norwegian is not present in Finland-Swedish. The so-called accent 2, used mainly in words with a two-syllable root is not used at all, and instead the normal accent 1 is used in all words. Hence Sweden-Swedish minimal pairs like ("the duck"), with stress on only the first syllable, and ("the spirit") with both syllables stressed, are both pronounced in Finland.

External links

[http://swedia.ling.umu.se/Finland/index.html SweDia] - a collection of dialect samples of Finland-Swedish Category:Swedish language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that is spoken in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and many other countries. English is now the third-most spoken native language worldwide (after Chinese and Hindi), with some 380 million speakers. It has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and that of the United States from the 20th century to the present. Through the global influence of native English speakers in cinema, airlines, broadcasting, science, and the Internet in recent decades, English is now the most widely learned second language in the world. Many students worldwide are required to learn some English, and a working knowledge of English is required in many fields and occupations.

History

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Old Saxon language brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany. The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke a variety of French. These two invasions caused English to become "creolised" to some degree (though it was never a full creole in the linguistic sense of the word); creolisation arises from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Friesian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of European languages; this new layer entered English through use in the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of considerable suppleness and huge vocabulary. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around the year 449, Vortigern, King of the British Isles, invited the "Angle kin" (Angles led by Hengest and Horsa) to help him against the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the south-east. Further aid was sought, and in response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes). The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms, known as the heptarchy. Modern scholarship considers most of this story to be legendary and politically motivated. These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived largely in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what would be called Old English, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now the Netherlands and north-west Germany. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north-east (see Jorvik). The new and the earlier settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were more distant, including the prefixes, suffixes and inflections of many of their words. The Germanic language of these Old English inhabitants of Britain would be partly creolised by the contact with Norse invaders. This resulted in a stripping away of much of the grammar of Old English, including gender and case, with the notable exception of the pronouns; thus, the language became simpler and plainer. The most famous work from the Old English period is the epic poem "Beowulf", by an unknown poet. For the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only a variety of French. A large number of Norman words were assimilated into Old English, with some words doubling for Old English words (for instance, ox/beef, sheep/mutton). The Norman influence reinforced the continual evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English. Among the changes was a broadening in the use of a unique aspect of English grammar, the "continuous" tenses, with the suffix "-ing". During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare. The most well-known work from the Middle English period is Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Classification and related languages

The English language belongs to the western subbranch of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The closest living relative of English is Scots (Lallans), a West Germanic language spoken mostly in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland. Like English, Scots is a direct descendant of Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon. After Scots, the next closest relative is Frisian—spoken in the Netherlands and Germany. Other less closely related living languages include Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Plattdüütsch and the Scandinavian languages. Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (pronunciations are not always identical, of course), because English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from French, via the Norman language after the Norman conquest and directly from French in further centuries; as a result, a substantial share of English vocabulary is quite close to the French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.), as well as occasional differences in meaning.

Geographic distribution

Norman conquest English is the second or third most widely spoken language in the world today; a total of 600–700 million people use English regularly. About 377 million people use English as their mother tongue, and an equal number of people use it as their second or foreign language. It is used widely in either the public or private sphere in more than 100 countries all over the world. In addition, the language has occupied a primary place in international academic and business communities. The current status of the English language compares with that of Latin in the past. English is the primary language in Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados (Caribbean English), Bermuda, Belize, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Guyana, Ireland (Irish English), Isle of Man, Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom (various forms of British English), the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the United States. English is also an important minority language of South Africa (South African English), and in several other former colonies and current dependent territories of the United Kingdom and the United States, for example Guam and Mauritius. In Hong Kong, English is an official language and is widely used in business activities. It is taught from kindergarten, and is the medium of instruction for a few primary schools, many secondary schools and all universities. Substantial numbers of students acquire native-speaker level. It is so widely used and spoken that it is inadequate to say it is merely a second or foreign language, though there are still many people in Hong Kong with poor or no command of English. The majority of English native speakers (67 to 70 per cent) live in the United States. Although the U.S. federal government has no official languages, it has been given official status by 27 of the 50 state governments, most of which have declared English their sole official language. Hawaii, Louisiana, and New Mexico have also designated Hawaiian, French, and Spanish, respectively, as official languages in conjunction with English. In many other countries where English is not a major first language, it is an official language; these countries include Cameroon, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Ghana, Gambia, India, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. English is the most widely learned and used foreign language in the world, and as such, many linguists believe it is no longer the exclusive cultural emblem of "native English speakers", but rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it grows in use. Others believe that there are limits to how far English can go in suiting everyone for communication purposes. It is the language most often studied as a foreign language in Europe (32.6 per cent), followed by French, German, and Spanish. It is also the most studied in Japan, South Korea and in the Republic of China (Taiwan), where it is compulsory for most high school students. See English as an additional language.

English as a global language

See also: English on the Internet Because English is so widely spoken, it has been referred to as a "global language". While English is not the official language in many countries, it is the language most often taught as a second language around the world. It is also, by international treaty, the official language for aircraft/airport communication. Its widespread acceptance as a first or second language is the main indication of its global status. There are numerous arguments for and against English as a global language. On one hand, having a global language aids in communication and in pooling information (for example, in the scientific community). On the other hand, it excludes those who, for one reason or another, are not fluent. It can also marginalise populations whose first language is not the global language, and lead to a cultural hegemony of the populations speaking the global language as a first language. Most of these arguments hold for any candidate for a global language, though the last two counter-arguments do not hold for languages not belonging to any ethnic group (like Esperanto). A secondary concern with respect to the spread of global languages (English, Spanish, etc.) is the resulting disappearance of minority languages, often along with the cultures and religions that are primarily transmitted in those languages. English has been implicated in a number of historical and ongoing so-called "language deaths" and "linguicides" around the world, many of which have also led to the loss of cultural heritage. In the Americas, Native American nations have been most strongly affected by this phenomenon.

Dialects and regional variants

The expansiveness of the British and the Americans has spread English throughout the globe. Because of its global spread, it has bred a variety of English dialects and English-based creoles and pidgins. The major varieties of English in most cases contain several subvarieties, such as Cockney within British English, Newfoundland English within Canadian English, and African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics") within American English. English is considered a pluricentric language, with no variety being clearly considered the only standard. Some consider Scots as an English dialect. Pronunciation, grammar and lexis differ, sometimes substantially. The Scottish dialect retains many German aspects including guttural pronunciations. Because of English's wide use as a second language, English speakers can have many different accents, which may identify the speaker's native dialect or language. For more distinctive characteristics of regional accents, see Regional accents of English speakers. For more distinctive characteristics of regional dialects, see List of dialects of the English language. Many countries around the world have blended English words and phrases into their everyday speech and refer to the result by a colloquial name that implies its bilingual origins, which parallels the English language's own addiction to loan words and borrowings. Named examples of these ad-hoc constructions, distinct from pidgin and creole languages, include Engrish, Wasei-eigo, Franglais and Spanglish. (See List of dialects of the English language for a complete list.) Europanto combines many languages but has an English core.

Constructed variants of English

- Basic English is simplified for easy international use. It is used by some aircraft manufacturers and other international businesses to write manuals and communicate. Some English schools in the Far East teach it as an initial practical subset of English.
- Special English is a simplified version of English used by the Voice of America. It uses a vocabulary of 1500 words.
- English reform is an attempt to improve collectively upon the English language.
- Seaspeak and the related Airspeak and Policespeak, all based on restricted vocabularies, were designed by Edward Johnson in the 1980s to aid international co-operation and communication in specific areas.
- European English is a new variant of the English language created to become the common language in Europe.

Sounds

Vowels

Notes: It is the vowels that differ most from region to region. Where symbols appear in pairs, the first corresponds to the sounds used in North American English, the second corresponds to English spoken elsewhere. #North American English lacks this sound; words with this sound are pronounced with or . According to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998), this sound is present in Standard Canadian English. #Many dialects of North American English do not have this vowel. See cot-caught merger. #The North American variation of this sound is a rhotic vowel. #Many speakers of North American English do not distinguish between these two unstressed vowels. For them, roses and Rosa's are pronounced the same, and the symbol usually used is schwa . #This sound is often transcribed with or with . #The letter U can represent either /u/ or the iotated vowel /ju/.

Consonants

This is the English Consonantal System using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). #The velar nasal is a non-phonemic allophone of /n/ in some northerly British accents, appearing only before /g/. In all other dialects it is a separate phoneme, although it only occurs in syllable codas. #The alveolar flap is an allophone of /t/ and /d/ in unstressed syllables in North American English and increasingly in Australian English. This is the sound of "tt" or "dd" in the words latter and ladder, which are homophones in North American English. This is the same sound represented by single "r" in some varieties of Spanish. #In some dialects, such as Cockney, the interdentals /θ/ and /ð/ are usually merged with /f/ and /v/, and in others, like African American Vernacular English, /ð/ is merged with /d/. In some Irish varieties, /θ/ and /ð/ become the corresponding dental plosives, which then contrast with the usual alveolar plosives. #The sounds are labialised in some dialects. Labialisation is never contrastive in initial position and therefore is sometimes not transcribed. #The voiceless velar fricative /x/ is used only by Scottish or Welsh speakers of English for Scots/Gaelic words such as loch or by some speakers for loanwords from German and Hebrew like Bach or Chanukah /xanuka/, or in some dialects such as Scouse (Liverpool) where the affricate [kx] is used instead of /k/ in words such as docker . Most native speakers have a great deal of trouble pronouncing it correctly when learning a foreign language. Most speakers use the sounds [k] and [h] instead. #Voiceless w is found in Scottish, Irish, some upper-class British, some eastern United States, and New Zealand accents. In all other dialects it is merged with /w/.

Voicing and Aspiration

Voicing and aspiration of stop consonants in English depend on dialect and context, but a few general rules can be given:
- Voiceless plosives and affricates (//, //, //, and //) are aspirated when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable and are not part of a consonant cluster—compare pin [] and spin [].
- In some dialects, aspiration extends to unstressed syllables as well.
- In other dialects, such as Indian English, most or all voiceless stops may remain unaspirated.
- Word-initial voiced plosives may be devoiced in some dialects.
- Word-terminal voiceless plosives may be unreleased or accompanied by a glottal stop in some dialects (e.g. many varieties of American English)—examples: tap [], sack [].
- Word-terminal voiced plosives may be devoiced in some dialects (e.g. some varieties of American English)—examples: sad [], bag []. In other dialects they are fully voiced in final position, but only partially voiced in initial position.

Intonation

Tone groups

English is an Intonation language. This means that the pitch of the voice is used syntactically, for example, to convey surprise and irony, or to change a statement into a question. In English, intonation patterns are on groups of words, which are called tone groups, tone units, intonation groups or sense groups. Tone groups are said on a single breath and, as a consequence, are of limited length, more often being on average five words long or lasting roughly two seconds. The structure of tone groups can have a crucial impact on the meaning of what is said. For example: :- :- :-

Characteristics of intonation

Each tone group can be subdivided into syllables, which can either be stressed (strong) or unstressed (weak). There is always a strong syllable, which is stressed more than the others. This is called the nuclear syllable. For example: :That | was | the | best | thing | you | could | have | done! Here, all syllables are unstressed, except the syllables/words "best" and "done", which are stressed. "Best" is stressed harder and, therefore, is the nuclear syllable. The nuclear syllable carries the main point the speaker wishes to make. For example: :John had stolen that money. (... not I) :John had stolen that money. (... you said he hadn't) :John had stolen that money. (... he wasn't given it) :John had stolen that money. (... not this money) :John had stolen that money. (... not something else) The nuclear syllable is spoken louder than all the others and has a characteristic change of pitch. The changes of pitch most commonly encountered in English are the rising pitch and the falling pitch, although the fall-rising pitch and/or the rise-falling pitch are sometimes used. For example: :When do you want to be paid? :Nów? (rising pitch. In this case, it denotes a question: can I be paid now?) :Nòw (falling pitch. In this case, it denotes a statement: I choose to be paid now)

Grammar

English grammar is based on its Germanic roots, though some scholars during the 1700s and 1800s attempted to impose Latin grammar upon it, with little success. English is just slightly inflected, much less so than most Indo-European languages. It compensates for this by placing more grammatical information in auxiliary words and word order. Unlike most other Indo-European languages, modern nominal groups (nouns) in English do not carry gender, although an archaic form of gender is technically assigned as either masculine, feminine, neuter or common. Engendered nouns are only apparent in special cases, such as "I loved that ship as if she were my own", where the noun "ship" is referred to by its feminine pronoun.

Vocabulary

Almost without exception, Germanic words (which include all the basics such as pronouns and conjunctions) are shorter and more informal. Latinate words are often regarded as more elegant or educated. However, the excessive use of Latinate words is often mistaken for either pretentiousness (as in the stereotypical policeman's talk of "apprehending the suspect") or obfuscation (as in a military document which says "neutralise" when it means "kill"). George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language gives a thorough treatment of this feature of English. An English speaker is often able to choose between Germanic and Latinate synonyms: "come" or "arrive"; "sight" or "vision"; "freedom" or "liberty"—and sometimes also between a word inherited through French and a borrowing direct from Latin of the same root word: "oversee", "survey" or "supervise". The richness of the language is that such synonyms have slightly different meanings, enabling the language to be used in a very flexible way to express fine variations or shades of thought. List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents In everyday speech the majority of words will normally be Germanic. If a speaker wishes to make a forceful point in an argument in a very blunt way, Germanic words will usually be chosen. A majority of Latinate words (or at least a majority of content words) will normally be used in more formal speech and writing, such as a courtroom or an encyclopedia article. English is noted for the vast size of its active vocabulary and its fluidity. English easily accepts technical terms into common usage and imports new words which often come into common usage. In addition, slang provides new meanings for old words. In fact this fluidity is so pronounced that a distinction often needs to be made between formal forms of English and contemporary usage. See also sociolinguistics.

Number of words in English

As the General Explanations at the beginning of the Oxford English Dictionary state: :The Vocabulary of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits.... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference. The vocabulary of English is undoubtedly vast, but assigning a specific number to its size is more a matter of definition than of calculation. Unlike other languages, there is no Academy to define officially accepted words. Neologisms are coined regularly in medicine, science and technology—some enter wide usage; others remain restricted to small circles. Foreign words used in immigrant communities often make their way into wider English usage. Archaic, dialectal, and regional words might be considered "English" or not. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) includes over 500,000 headwords, following a rather inclusive policy: :It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang (Supplement to the OED, 1933). The difficulty of defining the number of words is compounded by the emergence of new versions of English, such as Asian English.

Word origins

One of the consequences of the French influence is that the vocabulary of English is, to a certain extent, divided between those words which are Germanic (mostly Old English) and those which are "Latinate" (Latin-derived, mostly from Norman French but some borrowed directly from Latin). A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973) which estimated the origin of English words as follows:
- French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
- Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
- Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
- Greek: 5.32%
- No etymology given: 4.03%
- Derived from proper names: 3.28%
- All other languages contributed less than 1% James D. Nicoll made the oft-quoted observation: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1990May15.155309.8892%40watdragon.waterloo.edu&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain]

Writing system

English is written using the Latin alphabet. The spelling system or orthography of English is historical, not phonological. The spelling of words often diverges considerably from how they are spoken, and English spelling is often considered to be one of the most difficult to learn of any language that uses an alphabet. See English orthography.

Basic sound-letter correspondence

Written accents

English includes some words which can be written with accent marks. These words have mostly been imported from other languages, usually French. But it is increasingly rare for writers of English to actually use the accent marks for common words, even in very formal writing, to the point where actually writing the accent may be interpreted as a sign of pretension—though this view is counterbalanced by the view that fine typography should preserve accents, especially where it makes a distinction in pronunciation (compare façade vs. facade which would rhyme with cascade). The strongest tendency to retain the accent is in words that are atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign. For example, café has a pronounced final e, which would be silent by the normal English pronunciation rules. Some examples: ångström, appliqué, attaché, blasé, bric-à-brac, café, cliché, crème, crêpe, façade, fiancé(e), flambé, naïve, né(e), papier-mâché, passé, piñata, protégé, raison d'être, résumé, risqué, über-, vis-à-vis, voilà. For a more complete list, see List of English words with diacritics. Some words such as rôle and hôtel were first seen with accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accent is almost never used. The words were considered very French borrowings when first used in English, even accused by some of being foreign phrases used where English alternatives would suffice, but today their French origin is largely forgotten. The accent on "élite" has disappeared from most publications today, but Time magazine still uses it. For some words such as "soupçon" however, the only spelling found in English dictionaries (the OED and others) uses the diacritic. Italics, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, adiós, coup d'état, crème brûlée, pièce de résistance, raison d'être, über (übermensch), vis-à-vis. It is also possible to use a diaeresis to indicate a syllable break, but again this is often left out or a hyphen used instead. Examples: coöperate (or co-operate), daïs, naïve, noël, reëlect (or re-elect). One publication that still uses a diaeresis to indicate a syllable break is the New Yorker magazine. Written accents are also used occasionally in poetry and scripts for dramatic performances to indicate that a certain normally unstressed syllable in a word should be stressed for dramatic effect, or to keep with the meter of the poetry. This use is frequently seen in archaic and pseudoarchaic writings with the "-ed" suffix, to indicate that the "e" should be fully pronounced, as with cursèd. In certain older texts (typically in Commonwealth English), the use of ligatures is common in words such as archæology, œsophagus, and encyclopædia. Such words have Latin or Greek origin. Nowadays, the ligatures have been generally replaced in Commonwealth English by the separated letters "ae" and "oe" ("archaeology", "oesophagus") and in American English by "e" ("archeology", "esophagus"). However, the spellings "oeconomy" and "oecology" are now generally replaced by "economy" and "ecology" in Commonwealth English, making these spellings the same as in American English.
See also

- English literature
- Formal written English - regional differences
- List of languages
- Common phrases in various languages
Dialects

- American and British English differences
- English speaking Europe
- General American
- Li