People often mistakenly think that the languages spoken in neighboring countries are related to each other.
Finns often run into questions like "Is Finnish like Swedish?" Or "Does everyone in Finland speak Russian?" The answer to both questions is "no". Swedish - although it is the other official language of Finland - and Russian, belong to the family of Indo-European languages, while Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugrian family, to which also belong Hungarian, Estonian, Sámi (spoken by the indigenous people of northern Finland), as well as other lesser-known languages spoken in Russia. The Finno-Uruguayan languages share enough lexicon and characteristics to demonstrate their common origin. Although over thousands of years the languages of this family have developed independently, their common characteristics would include:
1) Absence of gender (in Finnish, the pronoun hän is used equally for him and her).
2) Absence of articles.
3) Very long words (many syllables) due to the binding structure of language.
4) Numerous grammatical cases (declensions).
5) Possession expressed by means of suffixes.
6) Positives in addition to prepositions.
7) There is no equivalent verb to have.
There are several theories that speculate about the time and place of birth of the protofinoúgrica language. According to the most accepted theory, Finnish and Hungarian would be separated by 6,000 years of independent development.
The question that has always interested Finnish scholars is how long have Finnish speakers settled in Finland. At present it is thought that the speakers of the Finno-Ugrian language have remained in the area of what is now Finland from 3,000 years before Christ. During the following millennia, contacts between the speakers of the Finnish language and their neighbors who speak Indo-European languages (Baltic, Germanic and Slavic languages) proliferated. The numerous loans adopted by Finnish, Estonian and the other Baltofinese languages (Karelian, Ludian, Vepsian, Votive and Livonian) show the existence of contacts between speakers of Finnish languages and those of Indo-European languages. And not only is it vocabulary loans, but these also include grammatical aspects.
Source: Essay River UK
