Who is Qualified to Teach Finnish?

If you are a native Finnish speaker are you qualified to teach the language to others? If a foreigner makes a grammatical mistake any native Finnish speaker is able to correct that mistake. Let’s take an example. A foreigner could say ”jatkataan”. All the native Finns can say that it should be ”jatketaan”. But why? Actually ”jatkataan” is an intelligent mistake because it follows the main rule how to form passive in verb type one.

Wait! What? Are there verb types in Finnish language? Most of the native Finnish speakers don’t know that we have six verb types in our language. They also don’t know the rules how to form different word forms. They know the right form but they don’t know how it is made.

Where were we? We were talking about an intelligent mistake in passive form ”jatkataan”. That follows the main rule which is that you need to take minä-form of verb in type one, it is ”jatkan”. Then you remove the personal endig -n and add the ending of passive which is -taan in verb type one. This is how you get ”jatkataan”. But then there is an extra rule and our example foreigner forgot it.

Native Finnish speakers don’t know these rules if they haven’t studied them. I am a native Finnish speaker. I have studied Finnish language at the university of Oulu. I have accomplished Basic Studies, Intermediate Studies and Advanced Studies + Thesis. Among those I have studied general linguistics, phonetics and Finnish as a foreign language. During my studies of my major subject Finnish no one ever told me that there are verb types in my native language. In those studies we had a different perspective on the language.

But what was the extra rule which makes ”jatkataan” to ”jatketaan”? In verb type one you take minä-form when you want to make passive. As mentioned before it’s ”jatka-n” where the last n is the ending of minä-form. If the last vowel before -n is a or ä you have to change it into e and then add the marker of passive which is -taan (or -tään) in verb type one. This is how you get jatka-n -> jatke + taan = jatketaan.