Is Finnish Language Difficult (part 1)?

The concept of a difficult language is difficult itself. To who is it difficult? The children learn their mother tongue anyway so none of the languages is difficult to children. If we think about learning a second language we have to remember that languages are related to each other and they form language families. Languages that are closer to our mother tongue are easier to learn than languages that are totally different. So how are we able to estimate the difficulty of a language then?

Let’s approach this topic by comparing some structural features of all the languages that are researched around the world. (There are approximately 7000 spoken languages in the worl but they are not all researched.) I am going to compare Finnish sounds, words and sentences to the average of all the researched languages.

The sound system of every single language consists of vowels and consonants. There are 8 vowels in Finnish language while the average among the languages of the world is 5. Some languages use only 3 vowels but some use a lot more than Finnish. A particularity of Finnish vowel system is called vowel harmony. It is quite rare but not unique. It means that the front vowels ä, ö, and y cannot be mixed with the back vowels a, o and u in one non-compound word. Another particularity in Finnish is the difference between long and short length, for example the words tuuli (wind) and tuli (fire) have distinct meanings. This feature is rare in European languages but in the scale of the whole world it is quite common. Almost half of the languages use the length of the vowels to separate meanings of the words.

Finnish language uses the length distinction also among the consonants, so that the words kissa (a cat) and kisa (a competition) have different meanings. Unlike among the vowels with the consonants the length distinction is not common in the world. Otherwise the Finnish consonant system is simple since we have only 13 consonants in habitual use and 17 consonants if the borrowed ones are counted. The average amount of consonants in the languages of the world is over 20. The consonant system in Finnish is also simple by the way how we compound consonants. In the beginning of the word or syllable there is only one or two consonants. If there are more the word is borrowed.

Some Finnish learners consider Finnish as a difficult language because we use a lot of endings that has to be added to the words. But if we compare how many verb conjugation categories there are the Finnish verbs place below the average. The most common are the languages that can use 4-5 different conjugation categories in one verb at the same time but Finnish verbs can use maximum 3. Some languages use even 13. Instead the Finnish nouns are more complex because we have very rich case system. We have 15 cases. The average is 6-7 cases. Hungarian language has 21. However it is very common that there is a category of gender among the languages of the world but there is the lack of gender in Finnish. Finnish language doesn’t use articles either. About half of the languages use articles and half don’t.

So far it seems like Finnish is not extremely difficult language among the languages of the world. Next time I will write about the sentence structure of Finnish language compared to the other languages.

Source: the article "Suomi maailmankartalle" by Ritva Laury in the book "Kieltä kohti"