Celebrating 100 Years of Finnish Independence: The History & Future of the Finnish Language

>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Grant Harris: Welcome, Your Excellency, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning, and welcome to the Library of Congress. I am Grant Harris. I'm Chief of the European Division. We would like to thank the Embassy of Finland for working with the Library on this celebration of 100 years of Finnish independence. This is really a great year, great event. And we thank all of the staff members at the Embassy and at the Library here who made this event possible. Very briefly, let me say that the Library of Congress is proud of its approximately 100,000 volumes from or about Finland. Among other things, we have an extensive collection of monographs on the subjects of the Finnish language, which is featured today, as well as Finns in the United States and Finnish-Americans. Between 400 and 500 volumes from Finland or about Finland arrive at the Library each year. The European Division is responsible for providing reference and for developing the Library's collections relating to Continental Europe. We hope you will come again to explore the Library's collections, and that you have a pleasant time here today. Now, for the inevitable announcement -- your cell phones, take a look at them if you haven't already. Be aware also that this event is being recorded for Library of Congress webcast. This is not a live event for the outside, but eventually, it will be made into a webcast. It is now my pleasure to introduce Her Excellency, the Ambassador of Finland to the United States, Kirsti Kauppi. She came to Washington as the Ambassador in 2015, but she has previous experience in the Embassy of Finland. She was here from 1997 to 2000. Ambassador Kauppi has over 30 years of experience in foreign policy, and has traveled widely, starting from her native Oulu area in northern Finland, which is not too far south of the Arctic Circle. With a master's degree in economics, she began working in development cooperation. Then, moving to the political side of foreign relations, she worked at Finland's permanent representation to the EU in Brussels, and at Finnish Embassies in Bangkok and Berlin. Madame Kauppi has been Director General of the Political Department at the Finnish State Department. Most recently, she served as Ambassador to Austria, and Finland's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and to other UN agencies. Don't be surprised if you meet her bicycling around in Washington, D.C. She is an avid reader, also, of works on history. She's fluent in English, Swedish, German and French, so she could really take advantage of our European collections. We'd like you to work in our division, actually. After remarks by the Ambassador, we will meet our distinguished panelists and hear their presentations, but I give you now the Ambassador. Thank you for being here. [ Applause ] >> Kirsti Kauppi: Good morning, [foreign language]. Thank you very much for the introduction, and I'll consider your offer. Sometimes my job as Ambassador is quite demanding and stressful, and I wouldn't mind switching over to the Library of Congress, maybe, at some point of time. It's -- I'm very grateful to the Library of Congress, and, of course, to my own staff at the Embassy of Finland, that this event has been -- is now organized, and is taking place. I think the Library of Congress is really something like not only a national treasure for the United States of America, but actually an international treasure, and the facts that you gave about Finland -- connection to Finland and the collections related to Finland are -- show that this institution is very important for Finland also, and I think for basically every country on earth. So congratulations for that, and we are very happy to cooperate with the Library of Congress. And we are very grateful for the attention the Library has given to Finland, and the Finnish language. Yes, we have the centennial of our independence, 100 years of Finnish independence, and our language is very much in the core of the national identity of Finland and Finns. There is a twist there, which is that we are -- we have two official languages. So it's not only the Finnish language that is in the core of the national identity. It is also very much the Swedish language, and the fact that we are a Nordic country. That is a big part of our identity. Finnish language is beautiful, difficult, very expressive, and I think really quite an exciting environment to study, to live in. And the way -- I mean, the Finnish language is a little bit like Finland. It's almost like an island, which means you have an environment where you tend to develop something quite special, and quite different from anything else. And I think the Finnish language has allowed that kind of a -- you know, a world of its own for Finns and Finnish speakers. And I think it also shows in the way the language has evolved. Teaching the language, and studying the language is very important. It is like, you know, history or anything else. Like, if you walk the streets of Washington, D.C. and you don't know anything about the history of the buildings, or what has happened here, it's only maybe 5% that you understand about what you see. And that is a little bit the same with the language. If you just hear it, or read it, and take it, well, maybe it's more than 5%, but you really get a deeper understanding, and you can master -- excuse me -- master the language only if you study the history, the structure, and so on and so forth. I'm old enough to have gone to school at the stage when you really studied the language in much detail. And I don't know the terms in English, but the way you had to study your own language was really quite something. And I think that is very much still behind the fact that Finns are very literate, and they not only can read, but they do read. And they love to read different kinds of literature, and also factual literature. Reading is important, and that is the area that I'm very worried about also in Finland. People read less, especially the young people, especially boys, read less. And I think that's going to have -- unless we can do something about it, and I believe we can do something about it, that can have a very negative influence not only on the -- how we speak and use the language, but on how we understand the world around us. Reading different kinds of literature is -- it's sort of -- it's really important in reaching your own mind, and bringing the world to you. So -- but I think today, we are really going to hear and learn about the history of the Finnish language, how it is today, and also how Finnish language has evolved in this environment, in the U.S., which is very, very interesting as well. And I'm very happy to see that there are -- there's quite a lot of material on the screens. Also quite funny material, which also is circulating in our social media. And that's great, because some of the -- some of the examples here I think are very good in raising the interest towards the Finnish language. The final point about, you know, how the interest towards language rises, or sort of where are the rules for the interest, that's also sometimes interesting. When I served in Austria, there's also Finnish language teaching in the university. I went to meet the class. It was something like 20 people, around -- maybe from 17 to 35, and I was looking around. It was people with black clothes, and black hair, and a little bit eccentric makeup. And I asked each of them, "Why do you -- why do you want to learn Finnish?" And they all referred to the heavy metal bands in Finland. So -- [ Laughter ] >> Very interesting, but also, I love the -- you know, that kind of stories, because it shows that there are links -- different kinds of links, and people really are very creative. In any case, I'm very happy to be here. I have to leave a little bit early, but very grateful that this seminar takes place, and very eager to hear from the experts. So thank you, everybody, for coming. [ Applause ] >> Good morning. [Foreign language], Finland 100. I'm Taru Spiegel from the European Division. I work there with Nordic books. And I know that everybody's eager to hear from our presenters, so I will be brief in the introductions. And I'm going to do this in order of presentation, so this time, it will be gentlemen first. So Daniel Karvonen works at the University of Minnesota. His Ph.D. is in linguistics with a specialization in phonology, and his research and publications are in word prosity, metrical theory and the phonology of loan words with an empirical focus on Finnish. Dan is a fourth-generation Finnish-American, and has spent much time in Finland. And this was the hardest part to introduce because of all these words like word prosity, and phonology, and so forth. But we'll hear about it from Dan. Alli Flint was born and raised in Finland. Her doctoral research was in linguistics and Uralic studies, and she has had a long and distinguished career at Columbia University. Alli and her late husband, Professor Austin Flint, collaborated on translating numerous works from Finnish. They were presented with a Finlandia Foundation Award for their work on behalf of Finnish culture, and Alli's also a Knight, First Class, of the Order of the Lion of Finland. Hillary Virtanen comes from Finlandia University of Michigan, as well as the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies and folklore. Her research interests center on Finnish-American folklore, orality and literacy in folk culture, and on protest-oriented folk music among Finnish-American laborers. She's a fourth- and fifth-generation Finnish-American. So please welcome our distinguished panelists. [ Applause ] >> Daniel Karvonen: Okay, [foreign language]. Good morning. I like the response. That's very nice. You're learning after the third time, see, after the Ambassador, and after Taru both introduced that. My name is Dan Karvonen, and as Taru said, I'm a lecturer of Finnish at the University of Minnesota. And I first want to say thank you to Taru from the Library of Congress, and the Ambassador, and all of the Ambassador's staff, for this, for inviting us to speak at this event. It's really a pleasure and a thrill to be at the Library of Congress. And back home, when I was telling people what I was doing this week, why I wasn't going to be at work, I said, "Well, I'm giving a talk at the Library of Congress," and in Minnesota, that's kind of a big deal. [ Laughter ] So anyway, here we are, and it's quite exciting. So, all right. So I'm going to talk about why Finnish is so -- why is Finnish so different? So there's sort of -- you know, if you ask people about Finnish, and the Ambassador already alluded to this, said, you know, Finnish is difficult. Finnish is different. You know, what -- what is it? Why is it so different? And then, we're going to look at it both from the structure, and also sort of the history. So I wanted to start out by talking about myths. So there are a lot of myths going out there, and as we saw, the slideshow that was going before I started talking, you saw all these nice memes kind of coming across the screen. And a lot of people have probably seen those memes. And here's a couple that you might have seen, the welcome to the Finnish language. I like that the Embassy had the same one that I have. There's -- and there's also this other one with the 10 oldest languages still spoken in the world today, and Finnish is apparently one of those. That's what people say. So this is what people say. People say, "Look at this. Welcome to the Finnish language. Look at this difficult language. You take -- " this graphic in the middle is an example of where you take one word, and you add all these different kinds of suffixes, and you can create all these other words. So that must mean that Finnish is just this crazy difficult language, right? Just by virtue of that. And then, on the right here, you have this example of all the -- the case system of Finnish. Finnish has 15 cases, and people say, "Finnish is difficult because it has 15 cases." Right? So instead of saying something like "in", in English, you would say -- add the suffix S-S-A, or S-S-ah, saw, sah [phonetic] for example. And people say, "That's what makes Finnish difficult." And then, you have this sort of idea out there that Finnish is one of the oldest languages in the world today. I would really like to say that none of this is true. And I'll tell you why. So number one, I'll start with the oldest languages in the world. I mean, that's kind of a crazy idea, that languages are old. If the language is spoken, it's modern. It's new. So this -- anytime I see something like this -- and people forward things like this to me all the time. I just say, "Wait, wait, wait, what is -- you know that that can't be true." Languages -- what they -- what they're trying to say, maybe, is that these are languages that maybe have not changed a lot, but there's really different from saying that a language is old, or new. All languages are -- that are spoken now are equally modern. There's nothing old about them. And then the whole idea of the case endings making Finnish difficult -- that's not a difficult thing to learn. In English, we say "in," we say "from," we say "to." In Finnish, you just learn the endings that relate to those. That's -- there's nothing difficult about that. That's 15 things to learn. That's not a huge task. And I will argue about the graphic in the middle if that -- that actually is what makes Finnish easy, not difficult. At the aspect of taking a single word, and then basing all these other words on this -- this is what makes Finnish easy to learn. So let's take a look at that. So what is the Foreign Service Institute saying? So I was looking for the original -- there are people from the Foreign Service Institute here today, but -- and I've seen different categorizations. But different sources that you look at, they put Finnish as one of the more difficult languages, right? So there are these different categories, a language that is -- and it's based on sort of the degree of relationship to English. These are all from the perspective of an English speaker, of course. Right? There are two factors that factor into this. One of them is the degree of relatedness of the language to English, and the second one is sort of the cultural differences. So we can see languages like Dutch and Swedish, they're related to English, being Germanic languages. And then, culturally, they're -- there's -- there's a lot of similarities between American culture and European culture. And then you see category two. You have German, but then you have Swahili. So here, we have a different culture, but we have a language that is maybe not so difficult to learn, compared to Finnish, for English speakers. And then we say Finnish is in the same category as Kazakh, and then we see category four, with Chinese and Japanese. And one of the big things about those two languages is the writing systems. But not only that. Japanese, for example, is the politeness levels. So there's all kinds of factors that go into what makes a language -- learning a language difficult. Right? So it's not just -- it's not just people out there. There are experts out there that say that actually, we need more weeks -- more weeks to actually learn Finnish than we do to learn Dutch. And you can see this in practice, if you -- I was an exchange student in Finland in high school, and most of us were in Finnish-speaking homes, but some people were in Swedish-speaking homes. And occasionally, during the year, we would get together. And the ones that were in Swedish-speaking homes, after three months, they could already speak. And the ones in the Finnish-speaking homes were just barely able to get a single word out of their mouth. So there's the proof right there. The proof is -- and this is from the -- the perspective of an English speaker. So one of the reasons that Finnish is so difficult is this, is this. So how many people do not know Finnish in the room at all? Okay, so there's some. I know there are a lot of people -- I've talked to a lot of people [inaudible] know Finnish. But people that don't know Finnish, can you guess what this is about? Can you have any guesses? This is from the Finnish news. I just plucked it off yesterday. I wanted to get fresh news. I just took a paragraph from a news article. Any guesses to what this is about? Is it a letter to grandma? Is it about the weather? Is it about, you know, the hurricane that sort of went to Ireland? Is it about any of those things? Is there anything we can grab onto? No. Nothing. >> Asia. >> Daniel Karvonen: Pardon? >> Asia. >> Asia. >> Daniel Karvonen: Asia? Yeah, no. That's actually not Asia. That's actually not Asia. Yeah, that's asia. Yeah, it's actually not even Asia. Yeah. That's not -- that's actually -- asia means matter. So you don't -- yeah. So there's not even a single cognate in this text. And this is the -- >> Rosatom. >> Daniel Karvonen: Rosatom. That's a name. Yeah, that's a proper name. That's the only thing, right? And there's another surname in there, Hanhikiven. But none of the other words have any cognates in English. So this is what -- this is one of the reasons that Finnish is sort of, in a way, impenetrable to English speakers, is that if you study a language like French, or German, or Swedish, you can look at a text, and you can just guess sort of what -- what it -- what it's about. This is actually about nuclear energy. So you wouldn't know by looking at this. And we can contrast this with French. So I just pulled this out of "Le Monde", just also, just to give an example of kind of a random article. And we look at this, and right away, as English speakers, you don't need to know French to recognize all kinds of words, right? And we can see them -- I've just highlighted them here in yellow. My color scheme, by the way, is a -- is a bow to the two official languages of Finland. If you haven't noticed that, the blue and the white -- the blue and the white, and the yellow. So yellow is my accent color. But you can see malady, neurology, generally -- you can see that learning French, there's just so much you get for free, for example. Right? You don't get that for free when you're studying Finnish, right? All these words are just completely -- I mean, there are definitely loan words, and I'll talk about that, from English and other languages. But they're not as frequent, and the overlap is much less. So this is one description that I -- someone told me a long time ago, and I use it all the time, because I love it so much. So people have said, "Learning Finnish is like a pyramid, and learning English is like an upside-down pyramid." So what does that mean? What does that mean? Well, if you take an example of English -- so the -- what this means is that, at the bottom of the pyramid for English, you don't need to know very much to get going. You can kind of just pluck words out of a dictionary and speak, because English doesn't have much morphology. So if you take the sentence on the left there, "The boys have two plates," all you have to do is go in the dictionary. The, boy, have, two, plates, and you just have to put an S for the plural. You just slap it on, and you've got your sentence. There's absolutely no manipulation you have to do to that sentence to make it a good English sentence. And it sounds perfect, right? Completely perfect. So it's dictionary-plucking. So pull the words out, and not much morphology. That exact same sentence in Finnish is not at all like that. So [foreign language]. There's a lot of manipulation that the learner of Finnish has to do in order to make that sentence sound correct. So one thing about it is, the word in Finnish for boy is [foreign language]. So in Finnish, we don't have a verb for to have. Instead, we say at. So I would say, "I have a car." [Foreign language], "At me is a car." So for one thing, the structure is completely different. And here, we see [foreign language]. What we have to do the word [foreign language], we have to add this L-L-A ending on it, and then we have to do something called consonant gradation, which means we have to weaken the consonant -- in this case, the K completely goes away. And we have to add the plural ending of the I there. So there's a lot you have to know to go from [foreign language] to [foreign language], and to make it sound right. And then, you see [foreign language] then requires the partitive singular case after it. So you can't just say [foreign language]. It's just -- you can say it. My students say, "Can I say that?" I say, "You can say that. It's just incorrect." Everyone will understand you, but it's not right, and you're not going to be my student, talking that way. [ Laughter ] So you have to know that there's a particular word type of words that end in N-E-N, and in the partitive singular, they change like that. So the N-E-N becomes S-T-A. So, like my name, Karvonen, if there were two of me, it'd be [foreign language]. First time I saw my name written in a different way, I thought, that's a misspelling. And they said, "No, no, that's how we do it in Finnish. We change the words like this." So literally, what you're saying sort of is "Boys at is two plate of." Right? Which makes no sense. So someone learning English, it's a lot easier to kind of get going at the bottom of the pyramid. But the thing about English is that, as you get going in English, English has this immense vocabulary, immense vocabulary. And native English speakers are constantly reading English, and seeing words they don't understand. I mean, how many people read English word -- read words then they don't understand, or run across words they don't understand? Yes. Probably everybody. In Finnish, the Finnish speakers here, how often do you run across Finnish words that you don't understand? Not often. Finnish people reading Finnish, they rarely run across a word they don't understand, and there's a reason for that. Because learning Finnish is a pyramid. You need a huge base. Where -- big. I don't say -- want to say huge, because then it makes it sound too scary. You need a pretty big base to learn Finnish, but as you get going, then it gets easier, actually. Everything starts to make sense. And when you get to the top, it's just like -- it's like nirvana. Everything really makes sense. And it's really true. My students in my advanced Finnish class, they start to see all these connections at the end, and then they say, "It gets so -- it's just easy now." Whereas the students in the intermediate stage really, really, really struggle. I'm having melt -- I have meltdowns every fall in my intermediate class. And I say -- and I always tell them, I say, "Oh, the advanced class, they're all relaxed. So just wait a year. It'll be okay. You just have to -- you just have to move up the pyramid." And that's really, I think, a good analogy for how learning English is compared to learning Finnish. So, okay. So one of the reasons about -- that it is -- Finnish is learning a pyramid, is because the vocabulary is -- a lot of words are sort of built on a common root. So if we take the word [foreign language], book, then we can create all these different words based on it. [Foreign language], all based on the same word. So a child learning -- acquiring Finnish learns a new word. Here's -- knows [foreign language], of course. Then here's [foreign language]. Oh, has something to do with a book. Okay. I don't need to know exactly, but I know it has something to do with a book. A kid learning English, here's book, and then someone says literature. No idea. No idea. Right? There's a lot more learning that has to go into learning that book, and literature, and author, and library are all related to each other, conceptually. Because there's nothing in the words themselves that link them together. So that's one of the things that makes really Finnish easy, really, and not difficult, I would claim. So just a little bit about the background of Finnish, is that English is an Indo-European -- is an Indo-European language, and Finnish is a Uralic language. So one of the reasons that makes it so different is because they're completely different language families. Right? So English is Germanic. It's in the Germanic sub-branch of the Indo-European language family, and Finnish is Uralic -- a Uralic language. So just being -- by virtue of being in a different language family, the vocabulary's different, and the structure is different. So that's really one of the challenges of learning it, is that it's just -- it's very different. I wouldn't necessarily so difficult. And just to give you -- if you're not familiar with the Uralic languages, here's a nice map that kind of shows you where the Uralic languages are spoken. We can see Finland over there on the -- on the left, and we can see the languages that are related to it. Most people, when you -- when you -- they say, "What languages is Finnish related to?" I will tell them Estonian and Hungarian, and I always finish it off with, "and a bunch of languages you've probably never heard of." Because I rarely run into a person that's heard of any of the other languages, like Mari or Udmurt, or Khanty, or Mansi, or Votic, or Livonian, or Veps. I mean, these don't ring any bells for most people. But they ring lots of bells for people that speak these languages, right? Because they're their languages. So these are the languages that Finnish is related to, and as you can see, they're sort of far-flung across -- mainly spoken in Russia. The reason that Finnish, and Estonian, and Hungarian are doing so well is because they all have national borders, and none of the other ones do. And all the other ones are seriously endangered for exactly that reason. You get borders, your language is going to do okay. That's really the way that you preserve a language, is by having borders, and, you know, having education in your language, having media in your language. I mean, that's -- you know, that's why Finnish is so vibrant, really. If Finland were part of Sweden, it might not be the same. Or part of Russia. It would be a very different story. And just a little bit about sort of where did Finnish come from. We don't really know for sure. Don't really know. But this is a -- this is a map that kind of offers some suggestions. This is a DNA haplogroup. The Y DNA, haplogroup N, which is actually my own haplogroup, and -- which men inherit from their father, and who inherited from their father, going back in time. You can see here that the -- 60% of Finnish men -- Finnish men have -- belong to haplogroup N, and you can see the -- this is the concentration of it in the world, where the darkest concentration is the -- is the -- the darkest color is the greatest concentration. So you can see, in Finland, it has a really, really dark color, and also all the way across the top of northern Russia, going all the way over. So those people are all genetically related to those Finns that have that -- that belong to that haplogroup. Not all Finns belong to that haplogroup. Some of the Finns, we say some of them came from Europe, and the others came from the east. Some came from the west, and some came from the east. But one of the -- sort of the migratory paths that one set of people came through is sort of out of Africa, into the Middle East, and then into Asia, and then finally reaching Finland as their sort of final terminus. And you can see that in western Europe, there's almost no incidence of it. So basically, Finland -- a little bit into Sweden, a little bit into Norway, and then it completely drops off. In the British Isles, there's almost zero incidence of haplogroup N. So they just didn't get any farther than Finland. But that kind of tells us, alludes to where the language is from. And if you notice, that previous map with the Uralic languages, it -- they overlap to quite an interesting -- in a very interesting way, right? So the fact that the languages -- language and genetics, of course, are not the same thing, and modern Finnish people are not genetically the same as the other Finno-Uralic speakers. But, there is a certain amount of overlap, and this sort of-- the DNA can kind of tell this, where the linguistic ancestors of the -- both the genetic and the linguistic ancestors of the Finns were. And just a little bit about the lexicon of Finnish, but first, I want to talk a little bit about English. So English is a Germanic language, right? As we all know. So it's a Germanic language in the Indo-European -- Germanic sub-branch of the Indo-European family. But in terms of its vocabulary, only 20% -- 26%, approximately, of its words are Germanic. So any time that any of us are speaking English, only about a quarter of the time are we really using those core words from English. The rest of the time, we're learning words that -- we're saying words that came from French, that came from Latin, and that came from Greek, for example, French and Latin being the bulk of it. Right? That's why that newspaper article from "Le Monde" had so much overlap. Because really, English is about a quarter French, or so, really, and then a lot of Latin. And that's what makes it so tough to learn, even as a native speakers, is because it's not transparent when you get into the higher levels. When you get into the fancy words in English, if you don't know Latin, you know, we have these tests where you have to take the GRE and learn all this crazy Latin vocabulary. And these are -- you know, people say, "These are English words," and the kids are saying, "What? They're not English words," we use in our daily life. But that is one of the reasons that English has its sort of huge, huge vocabulary. So in -- and Finnish has also a similar -- Finnish is not a pure language anymore than English is. There is no such thing as a pure language. That's completely a myth. It's another myth. There's no -- there are no pure -- genetically pure people. There's no pure language. So Finnish definitely -- even though I showed that page where you saw that, you know, Finnish looks sort of kind of impenetrable, it has had lots of influences from all different kinds of languages over its thousands of years of existence. So we have sort of these strata in Finnish. And if we go from the bottom, the bottom would be the native stratum. Those are words that are shared with most all Uralic languages. And then, moving up -- this is sort of a time-depth thing. So the first context that the ancient Uralic people had was with Indo-European people, and then Baltic peoples, Germanic -- I mean, the proto-Finnic people. Germanic, Slavic, Swedish, and English. And you can see -- based on this going from the, you know, 6000 years ago or so up to the present, you can see the different kinds of people that the linguistic ancestors of the Finns interacted with, right? So originally, the fact that Indo-European loans was the first group tells us that the Finns have not always been in Finland, or at least the linguistic ancestors of the Finn have not always been in Finland. Because they had these interactions with Indo-European people, probably in central Russia. And then, the Baltic loans tells us that they got to the Baltic at some point, right? And then the Germanic loans tells us that there was also interaction with Germanic-speaking peoples at that time. So we think of sort of these strata as just like archaeology, the graphic there with the archaeological layers. Finnish has these layers in its vocabulary of -- it has its basic -- basic native stratum, and then it has these accumulated layers. Modern Finnish speakers can't tell you this, "This word is from Baltic, and this word is from Germanic," any more than English speakers can say, "This word is from French," or "This word is from Arabic," at all. Unless it's a really, really recent loan, people -- speakers have almost no intuition about it. It has to be a recent loan for people to have an intuition. So the native stratum, an example would be body parts, or words from animals and nature, of course, because those are words that people have needed all the time, regardless of where they lived. Right? Regardless of your environment, you need to talk about body parts. You need to talk about animals and nature. The kinds of animals and the kind of nature can vary, depending on your environment, of course, but this tell us something about the -- where the Finns originally lived. You see that the word "birch," [foreign language], is a very, very old word. So that suggests that where the Finns originally were, birch trees existed. And, for example, [foreign language], river, that there was water, of course. And they had dogs and fish kind of everywhere, [foreign language]. Then, the -- one of the -- I'm not going to talk about all the strata, but another stratum that's really interesting is the Baltic stratum. So the Baltic stratum tells us, then, at one point, that the linguistic ancestors of the Finns met with people -- interacted with people in the Baltic area, so the ancestors of current, modern-day Latvians and Lithuanians. And you can see the kinds of words that were -- were borrowed into Finnish really reveal something about the nature of the contact. So here, we can see -- I've kind of done a couple of different colors here, to kind of show that we have words like [foreign language], hay, goat and seed, and those clearly relate to agriculture, right? So agriculture was something that kind of happened during this period when the linguistic ancestors of the Finns met, encountered the Baltic peoples. They didn't have -- they were hunter-gatherers to that point, and then they encountered agriculture. And they needed words for things that they had never needed to talk about before. Interestingly, there are three really interesting words, daughter, sister and bride, that were also introduced in this area. Which, you might just want to speculate at home tonight about what happened there. But it's a -- really intriguing to think about those kinds of things. Why would a language -- certainly, there were daughters, and sisters, and brides before this point, but why were these particular words introduced at this point? Again, it tells you something about the nature of the contact, right? What was happening. It wasn't just a culture sharing. It was more intimate sharing, of course, right? And then, we see there are other words related to food. So we have, for example, salmon, pea and porridge, and then we have the sea. That's really interesting. So the word [foreign language], the sea -- so in other words, this is the first time they ever saw the sea. Right? They didn't see the sea at -- they don't -- you don't need to talk about the sea if you don't have a sea. And then you have a sea, and then you need a word for bay. So it's really revealing, these layers of the vocabulary, if you -- if you -- you know, the people that do this kind of research, you can really see what kinds of cultural contact sort of happened. Moving onto the Germanic stratum, we have a similar kind of cultural contact here, where we have a lot of farming words. So chicken, sheep, plow, all the words for grains, right? So all the grains were introduced at this point. So they were -- you know, again, the linguistic ancestors of the Finns were hunter-gatherers, and now, suddenly, they were -- they were living in places where they were -- they were growing -- growing food, and staying in one place at one time. A very, very interesting -- and also, we see all the words for the different metals, so gold, tin, iron, [foreign language], for example, ore, and a very, very interesting word is [foreign language], mother. Which is just always -- the students are -- my students are always just, how could mother be a loan word? Didn't they have mothers before? And I always say, "Well, the Finns were hatched." No, not really. It goes back to the Kalevala egg kind of idea, but -- but -- if you know anything about the Kalevala. But it's a very interesting word. So there is a -- there's a -- the original word for mother, which is [foreign language] and [foreign language], then is used only for animal mothers, now, in modern Finnish. So what happened was, the original word became smaller, in terms of its semantic field, and then this new word [foreign language] came in and supplanted it. So then -- and that, again, suggests a different kind of contact. Not just cultural contact, but people contact, right, which is really interesting. When students learn [foreign language], they have to learn we divide words in Finnish that end in I into old words and new words. And they have to learn that that is a new word, even though they want to think it's an old word. Because they say, "That language -- the word has to have been in the language for a long time." I said, "Yeah, a couple thousand years, but not 6000. It's relatively new." So -- and then we get to the most recent stratum, and this is the stratum that is really happening right now. This is what's happening in Finnish, and there are just tons of words every single day coming into Finnish from English. So we have words like [foreign language], to work out, for example. [Foreign language], very recent word, right? This came up with Skype. Then they have -- they need a verb, [foreign language]. To Google, [foreign language]. You can also say [foreign language]. There's two verbs for that. [Foreign language], to hang out, right? Just plain old show, for example, [foreign language]. There were perfectly good ways in Finnish for saying these things, but suddenly, they say this. And then, my absolute favorite is yes. Which does not, in Finnish, mean yes. It means good or excellent. So what happens when -- you know, when a language borrows a word, it just -- there are no rules, right? It's like you give something -- you give a gift to somebody, and they do whatever they want with it. And Finnish took this word, and just went and did what it wanted. So now, in Finnish, it's totally normal to say -- you say [foreign language], how was the movie? They say [foreign language] yes. It was really yes. Which is something in English we would never say, right? We would never do it that way. Yes means yes and yes only. It's not an adjective. In Finnish, it has become an adjective, which is really fascinating. So yeah. So -- and this -- this group is being added to all the time. Okay, then, moving away from the vocabulary and into the morphology, just -- this is kind of a familiar concept to a lot of people, is that one of the things -- the characteristics of Finnish that make it different, not necessarily difficult, is just this ability to add suffixes onto words, and to build longer words. So we say [foreign languages] means house, [foreign language] in the house, [foreign language] in my house, [foreign language] in my house also, [foreign language], make it a question by adding the ko [phonetic], [foreign language] in my house also, and then you can say "I wonder." So [foreign language]. I wonder in my house also, are there rats, maybe? Your neighbor has rats, and you would say -- because you would think, no one would ever say that. No, no, I can think of a context. Your neighbor has rats. Oh, [foreign language]. I wonder if there are rats in my house, too. Totally natural context. This is not a crazy word. So that's one thing that people say makes Finnish difficult. There's nothing difficult about it. You see the word. You know the endings. You know what they mean. You add them on. That aspect of it is not difficult. Making long words based on these little suffixes is not difficult. What is -- okay, yes, and here's another graphic that's gone around. This is from Scandinavia in the world. This is kind of one of these memes. Finnish has a word for "I wonder if I should run around aimlessly," and in Finnish, that is [foreign language]. And you see that same -han suffix, right? So again, this is what people think makes Finnish difficult. I don't think that's what makes Finnish difficult. So I would say Finnish is different, but one of the things is the vocabulary is so different, right? So learning the vocabulary is an enormous task. You just have to learn that this is called [foreign language], which has no relation to table, right? Or you have to learn that this is [foreign language], which has no relation to shoe. You just have to memorize that. There's nothing you can do about it. But, one of the challenges of Finnish is what -- something that we call [foreign language], which are word types. So in Finnish, as you notice from the previous slide -- or, two slides ago, when you have the word [foreign language], if I would've written it -- I didn't write it here by itself, but if I wrote it by itself, then you just do add the ending on, and you don't do anything to it. However, not all words are so friendly. There are a lot of words in Finnish that are -- you have to know more. So you have to know what we call [foreign language]. So you remember from my initial slide, my early slide, the one with the two plates, the words that end in N-E-N, you don't just add the ending to the -- you don't slap it on the end of the word. What you do is, you have to know the root. And the root is the -- is the form on the far right there, that has the little dash, and the dash means I'm not complete until I get a suffix added onto me. So [foreign language] means red, and if you want to say "in the red house," for example, you say [foreign language]. So the student has to learn, okay, [foreign language] is a "nen" word. "Nen" words, their stem is in "se." So "nen" becomes "se," and then I add my ending on. So then I have to say [foreign language]. But, if I have a word ending in S-I, then it's different. Then a word like [foreign language], which means water, becomes [foreign language]. Okay, so "in the water" then has to be [foreign language]. Or, if I have a word like [foreign language] at the very bottom, "beautiful," then I want to say "in the beautiful house," then I have to say [foreign language]. This is definitely a task to learn. And I have -- I don't know how many, five, 10 types here. There are about 40. So I don't tell the students that at the beginning. If I would, they would -- they would run out of the room screaming. We introduce them a little at a time. But that is definitely one thing that I would say, not the fact that there are case endings. This is one of the things that makes Finnish, not difficult, but challenging. And just another couple examples here, is people will -- students will say me -- say to me, "How do you say dogs in Finnish?" I'm like, oh, it depends. So in English, "The dogs are running. I have two dogs. There are dogs in the yard." Dogs, dogs, dogs. In Finnish, [foreign language]. All depends on the sentence. I can't answer that question. I cannot answer that question without a sentence. And in a similar way, how do you say "for" in Finnish? This is even worse. How do you say for? Oh, "This is for you. I'm waiting for the bus. She went there for a year. Buy a ticket for the movie." No, in Finnish, [foreign language]. For -- there's, like, five different -- four different endings there, depending on the context. There's not a one-to-one mapping. That definitely is a challenge to learn. Not the fact that there are case endings, but that there is this really -- this -- not a one-to-one match between the two languages. So what I would say is that Finnish is different, not necessarily difficult. And so the proof of that is me. I did not grow up speaking Finnish, and I am not a genius by any means. And I have learned Finnish, and the -- on the picture on the right is a group of my students who all speak Finnish very well. And I've had 15 years of these kind of students coming through my program, and they're not all geniuses. Well, some of them are. But not all of them are geniuses, and they do really well. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you for your attention. [ Applause ] >> Alli Flint: Well, Dan is a hard act to follow. I just have to say, before I launch into what I want to say in -- at length, is that when I kept getting new information about this conference, and was very happy to be invited to it, and really honored. I then thought, oh, yes, but -- and I finally then looked at exactly where, and at the Library of Congress, this was going to take place. And it was -- and then, oh, now, wait a second. That reminds me of something. In -- I want to take you back to January 24th, 1985, where -- when there was a symposium on the Kalevala at -- on the 150th anniversary of the first Kalevala, in 1820 -- 1835, which is now referred to as the Old Kalevala, since the '40 -- 1849 was then the canonic version. There was a really wonderfully designed conference of folklorists, and people in literature, and people who had thought deeply about the Kalevala. The -- but there was also the sound of the Kalevala being heard after Alan Jabbour, who was the head of the folk life center at the time, had welcomed us in. And then -- and Lauri Honko, a professor of folklore in University of Helsinki, and a very major figure in epic -- study of epics, internationally respected. They had started it with brief announcements. Then my -- I, and my husband -- late husband, Austin Flint, had been from Columbia. Both of us were asked to give a bilingual reading of the Kalevala, and those of you who know something about the Kalevala would -- when one says [foreign language], mother of Lemminkainen at Tuonela River would mean something. You immediately see an image of the mother of one of the heroes of the Kalevala, or scandal -- heroes or scoundrels of the Kalevala. Lemminkainen, who always got into trouble, and was -- finally met his end, having thought that he was invincible, was very -- was killed, and was in pieces in the River of Tuonela, the abode of the death. Now -- so it's not a cheerful text, but it's a very interesting -- it's a very dramatic scene in the Kalevala, where Lemminkainen's mother, with her shamanic powers, is putting -- is first of all, raking with an enormous rake these pieces of her son from the River of the Dead, and then bringing him back to life. So I read it in Finnish, but I read it from the Old Kalevala, which is -- which is the same story, but slightly different words, in honor of that we were celebrating the 18 -- 1835 version. And then my husband read it in English, and then we were later told that, yes, the English version made it to the Finnish TV, and they had seen it, which pleased me no end. So I just really want to -- and there was so much -- now that I go back to think about that symposium, it really -- I mean, I had studied the Kalevala. I had taught the Kalevala at Columbia. I had done various things, and I realize now how much that kind of gathering, of getting together folklorists, literature people, anthropology -- cultural anthropologists, music -- ethnomusicologists. And then, in a way, looking at all the pieces, and what -- what -- you can, in a way, to get the essence of it, and get a sort of grip on what all it can mean. And so -- and I thought that, just in case there are people here -- which, I think in any audience, there might well be, who don't -- the Kalevala, what is it? I will read the pithy -- is of my humble photocopy of the program, of the '85 conference. "The Kalevala is the Finnish national epic. It was compiled by Elias Loennrot from folk poems collect in rural -- in rural Finland, and first published in 1835. The symposium will explore the role of the Kalevala as a symbol of Finnish national identity, and reflect upon the development of its symbols of identity in American-Finnish communities." And so then it when it on -- the whole day went on to discuss what other aspects, what other tokens of identity might there be in Finnish-American communities. And then, Yvonne Hipakaluk [assumed spelling], who gave a very interesting talk on -- a cultural anthropologist, gave a wonderful talk on the various -- on [foreign language], but also pasties, which became big. However, they were a Cornish -- Cornish immigrants had brought those to the country, and the Finnish -- they seem probably enough like a [foreign language] that they became very much taken by the -- and I've had students at Columbia who just -- "Oh, pasties, oh, my mother's going to send me some pasties. I'll bring some to class." And we had them. And I had them also at Hancock, so it was my first time of ever getting pasties. So that the -- and then, the last item that Yvonne Hipakaluk [assumed spelling] would -- spoke about was the St. Urho myth, which was of totally newfangled -- new, new celebration, day before St. Patrick's Day. So there was a certain kind of inter-European jealousy of the saints. So very unlikely, really a tall tale. But so -- that day was sort of -- it was -- it really was excellent, in terms of looking at the Kalevala. Of course, it can -- we can just read it as a -- read it, or be exposed to it one way or another as a work of art, which it is. Loennrot was a collector. He was first a medical doctor. That was his, as one would say -- maybe his day job for a good while, and he was -- in eastern Finland, he was the district doctor in Kajaani, and -- way, way, eastern -- northeastern Finland. And he then started listening to the folklore, people who still knew the old songs and the old poems. And this was a very -- it was very poor area, and the whole -- but he would -- usually on foot, and sometimes he got sort of a horse ride, but mostly on foot, he collected, and he then got the sort of cultural [inaudible] to collect it. And there was the Finnish Literature Society, which had the intelligentsia of -- interested in seeing how these could be -- come to fruition and be published. And, in fact, the Finnish Literature Society was established just in time to publish the Kalevala, and to fund it, and really use -- when -- if anyone has ever had anything to do with trying to get funds for certain cultural -- you're nodding. Cultural efforts, it's always a -- it's also political. And also, we have to keep in mind that the -- that in -- so 1835, where was Finland? Finland was -- had, in 1809, stopped being part of Sweden. And the Peace of Hamina decreed that the border was to be made more eastern, and the border was -- more western, rather. It was to be moved west between Finland and Sweden. So Finland suddenly wasn't part of Sweden, and then from -- so 1809 to 1917, Finland was the autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia. And so that there was room to -- what -- now what? And so there was this -- actually a very dramatic -- by the end of the 19th century, dramatic shift where Finnish intelligentsia who were deciding things, who, in fact, spoke with each other -- they negotiated these issues within Swedish, because that was the language of the ruling class, and the cultural great. So the -- and many families -- and to hold the drama -- and I think it's not much has been, in fact, paid attention to the drama of Finnish families who had, until then, spoken Swedish, because they would know Finnish. But they would -- Swedish was, in a way, the going language, and they would then, within a couple of generations, totally shift the family language into Finnish, and be very conscious about it. And the political discussion is interesting, but we won't go there. So after had -- had these wonderful days of this Kalevala conference, I then got on the Amtrak train and went back to New York. And in -- but, like, five days later, we had a symposium at Columbia called From Folk to Nation. Now, folk in Finnish is [foreign language]. Nation in Finnish is [foreign language]. So that -- in a way -- and that sort of -- when you talk about the transparency of Finnish vocabulary, and one says, "Well, [foreign language], lots of folks there, right?" Very informal, not organized, but then, the same semantic root was also used for the collection of people who were Finns, who were -- lived in Finland. That was [foreign language]. So the -- and then, we have -- so [foreign language], the folk poetry, but then [foreign language], the derivational suffix of what sort are you, the citizen. So that, in a way, it -- root Finnish really does -- I was happy that you brought that -- brought that in, that for a Finn, it's intuitively easy to say what has got to do something -- it has got to mean something about people, right? Yes. Okay. So then -- and I think what -- what I think, when you said at the intermediate year of learning Finnish, teaching Finnish, is very frustrating, because the first year is okay. Because when you add something to zero, it feels like an accomplishment, and you're happy. Because you learn -- you do learn a fair amount. And then, if the teaching is being done well, then -- or if the class is designed sort of in a sound way, the -- you will have learned sort of -- you will have learned it in different kinds -- different ways of complexity. But the intermediate is -- then you begin to know what all else is ahead. And -- but then, exactly, advanced students, once that's past, then that can -- that can really change. So we had another conference, and then, obviously, life went on at Columbia. Now, I will move to Columbia, and I want to tell you about the -- that Finnish has been at Columbia -- there has been some Finnish at Columbia since 1940s. The first person teaching it was Professor John B. Oley [assumed spelling], who was also a -- who was a professor at City University in Germanic and Slavic languages. And so he taught them in courses. By 1960s -- the '50s, '60s, it was more and more included in the academic curriculum of the university, and then was offered as -- by '60s in Uralic -- Uralic studies within the department of linguistics. And so -- and there were a great many theoretical -- theoretical courses in Uralic studies as well. The contemporary -- the most -- very recent maps reminded me of the -- of the less pretty maps, but the same information of the related languages. And so those of us who were at Columbia -- and I did my doctoral work at Columbia, and sat in -- Ken, where are you? There you are. With Kenneth Neradi [assumed spelling] of the Library of Congress, and of the European section. We sat in Uralic seminars, and we were working on entirely different things, right? And then, I have to just -- to sort of -- the Finnish wouldn't continue, or the Uralic languages wouldn't continue at Columbia if it hadn't been for someone like Professor Robert Austerlitz. Who might be familiar to some of you who are not too young -- who are not so young as not to have met him, who was a very multi -- multilingual, multi-talented human being. And his -- with his seminal research in Finnish and with Uralic languages, as well as many other languages, and scholarly publication, he was one who was the -- at some point, he was the head of the American Linguistic Society. And he was very active in the entire country, as well as internationally. So he brought a lot of the knowledge of that to the, say, American academia, and always -- I don't know how about in -- in Minneapolis, whether you have students in linguistics who flock to your classes. Yeah? Most? >> Daniel Karvonen: Some. >> Alli Flint: Some. Yeah, okay. Some. Because it's a really interesting thing, that if you have students who are in linguistics, and they really want to do Finnish, or they are required to learn a non-Indo-European language, which immediately puts them on the different -- on the heavier -- heavier workload languages, they -- they get delighted when there is [foreign language]. And that's an easy one, obviously. But the more suffixes, the better, whereas the student who says, "Look, please, not -- no more grammar today," then it -- there's a -- so that there are kind of all kinds of pyramids that -- in the contrast. So Columbia certainly -- when I was first teaching at Columbia, Finnish at Columbia, I was -- most of the students -- maybe -- really, I would say more students than not were from linguistics. Because they truly had that requirement, that they had to learn one -- that they had to have -- and many of them wanted to, and quite willingly were studying Finnish. And they were also always students from different fields, so that Columbia -- in those years, when the graduate student population was also helped by the NDFL legislation, which helped graduate students to study an odd language, or a less commonly-taught -- I think in those days, they were called neglected languages. Now, we all said, who were teaching, "These languages, we never neglected them." Then, I think the -- they were beginning to be called less common. Now, the polite -- politically okay phrase, I believe, that's used is less-commonly-taught. And then, of course, we would say amongst ourselves, "Teach them every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday." So it's not less -- it's not less common, but they are -- they have this different status. And so, the -- so linguists have always been interested, but we had -- but over the years, there have been master's theses and doctoral dissertations in anthropology, for, like, almost, like, three generations of anthropology graduate work. Students who then been professors in various places, including Columbia and -- I think Michigan State, and Brooklyn College, at the City University of New York. And sociology, literature, and linguistics, obviously, as well as in music, where the people who were in music also sometimes came to the Uralic seminars. Now, Ken Neradi [assumed spelling] was working on Komi, which I was a part of -- was very exciting, because I was also trying to learn enough Komi in order to be able to go to the Finno-Ugric Congress in Syktyvkar, Komi at the -- in 1985. It was a big seminal year. And so you -- I was so impressed by Ken Neradi's opening the newspaper and just reading, reading fully all these things about Komi. And I was working on Komi riddles in folklore, and there, there was always a man with axe walks into woods, and what is it? So that my -- my sort of -- kind of -- the texts that I was reading were very different from yours. But we -- the whole seminar was run in such a way that Austerlitz -- in fact, he just simply started as an extra thing for everybody, that, well, in two years, there's going to be this Finno-Ugric Congress in Syktyvkar, in Komi land. And it would be good if quite a few of us went, and gave papers. Now, if we're going to Syktyvkar, we should really do something about their language, shouldn't we? It would be polite. And some of us said, "Well, we don't know enough," or -- he said, "Well, we have two years." Every week, we had an extra Komi -- an extra session on these. So we worked on them, and four of us did go. So it is -- but with Columbia, it tends to be that Finnish has always been sort of in the midst of many other languages. Columbia still teaches over four -- there are 40 foreign languages, plus -- 40-plus languages taught. And so Finnish is one of them, and Hungarian is another. And -- which you also studied, right? And so the -- so it's a very kind of -- in a way, the context in which Finnish is taught at Columbia is very much in the context of many, many other languages, as many other fields, as well. The students, at this point, aren't writing doctoral dissertations because the -- in a way, the graduate program has waned. And the under -- there are more undergraduate students. But they're doing very well, and many have -- many have -- over the years, have been helped by Finland, which has -- Finland has a very generous system of inviting foreign students, who have to apply, to summer courses, and get a really heavy dose of being among others -- being with students from other countries, studying Finnish in Finland, in the location. And so their -- they have a lot of contact with Finland as well. The other thing that happens, and it's been very much design, and sort of we've wanted it that way, is that when -- people who come to the United States from Finland, they somehow -- lots of planes land on the -- at the airports. And people who don't even mean to come to New York, they happen to come through. And so they very often then are in touch, and come by, and so that -- we've had -- just even naturally -- [inaudible] visitors -- visitors from Finland, so that the dialogue and the contact can continue. And we've had a great many organized events of symposia and lectures, as well as -- as well as informal -- and readings, poetry -- a flock of Finnish poets were in New York at a given year. And they were also at Columbia, where we had then a trilingual event of Finnish, Swedish and English poetry being read. And so students have, over the years, met everybody from Neils Aslakvolkyapa [assumed spelling], a Sami performer and singer, and all-purpose -- he was a very gifted, gifted individual for that group. And so then, the one thing that -- and we go through, you know, the -- where every -- I think in every place, the language is the same, and students need to learn it. And it -- we are -- we have really used a lot -- some of the Austerlitzian way of looking at the sort of morphophonemics of Finnish, and -- for the linguists, you -- it can be done explicitly. And then, for the non-linguists, it needs to be softened, and shown in the right context. But so, the -- our students are used -- or certainly were, and they still are, used to meeting Finns. And they are from the very -- when they first walk in, they're greeted in Finnish, and they're expected to make a noise in Finnish at that point. And it is indicated what it might be. And -- so that, in a way, they start expressing themselves in Finnish from the very start. And that's -- I think with many languages at Columbia, that's usually -- very often is the case, that it's -- the target language is what is -- what you hear in class. I certainly have heard it in -- having been reviewing the Chinese teacher, and hearing -- not that I know -- but I was -- as an external reviewer of a particular Chinese teacher, and there was an elementary Chinese Mandarin class where there was just this noise in the classroom that the students were producing. And she was keeping it very organized at the same time as it was exuberant. So the fact that they meet -- that students have gotten used to the idea that Finnish -- Finns might come anytime. Because I very often them have -- I used to, and my younger colleagues who've followed after, have often done it as well, having a Finn visit a class. And then, the Finn is sort of -- they really have to be kind of a -- kind of interested person, who is not going to say, "Why are you studying Finnish?" Which, of course, very many people will ask, but I sort of -- I said, like, that's not one thing we'd say. And we will not -- we will not slip into English. We will stay in Finnish. But it then has to be -- that person has to be sensitive to children, because you have to have someone who doesn't start telling them, "Oh, you speak better than you," or something like that. No. But in most cases -- in just about all cases, it is -- it has been very successful. So that then, when President Ahtisaari gets his honorary doctorate at Columbia in 2000, and after various cajoling of the -- of getting the permit to get the students to meet him afterwards, and he addresses the students. And they have a meeting, and everyone can -- is able to say something in Finnish. And then, Ahtisaari also spoke a lot in English, dealing with world sort of affairs. But they had the meeting. And another one, when President Tarja Halonen, in the fall of 2005, I believe it was, gave the opening lecture at Columbia's World Leaders Forum, where -- when all the heads of state arrive at the UN for those weeks, they are -- they are then, very often come to Columbia. And she met them, and spoke Finnish with them, and told a funny story. And so these events become then part of the curriculum of that particular year, and that -- those classes, and the students then go back and research more about the people whom they've met. Now, we've met -- we've also had people who are not presidents, as well. But in a way, that -- the fact that you've spoken with a Finn, or with some Finns, lets you be natural when the President of Finland shakes your hand, and you say -- he says something, or she says something. And you can -- you know that there's something that you might say, or you might ask. So then, I will also move to one of the events that we've used a lot, which has -- it doesn't seem possibly -- perhaps, it doesn't seem likely. That if you declare that you're going to have a multilingual, multicultural evening on Kalevala poetry in many, many languages, it might not seem part of language teaching. But it ends up being, which is really very kind of interesting. It -- the fact that we've now had many -- several Kalevala marathons of anything from [inaudible]. The first one was eight hours, and second -- then it was six hours, and then it's been four or five hours of Kalevala in just this -- there would be tables with translations into other languages. And since the Kalevala has been translated into over 60 foreign languages by now, and if Columbia still teaches more than 40 foreign languages -- so it seems like -- and then, 40% of Columbia faculty are foreign-born. And New York is -- I don't even frankly know how many languages, but it's somewhere around 200 languages spoken around New York. All you need to do is to be in a subway car, and you know that there are languages you don't know that are being spoken. So that there's -- the milieu, in a way, is hospitable to something like this. Then, the fact that many young Finnish artists come to New York -- some of them are performing artists, and some are -- and many musicians come to New York. And they get sort of slightly homesick for tribal events, too. So they're happy to come and perform. So one person who has been solid, always on hand and willing to do her piece is Stina Elt [assumed spelling], who lives not far from the university. And she has always been part of the Kalevala marathon, and done it in Finland Swedish, which was actually her first language, and then in Finnish. And she's done wonderful things. Younger artists, such as Thomas Hildanen and Ulla Swalko [assumed spelling], who are both musicians and wonderful performers, have also been very steadfastly -- but when they're -- now, they have both left New York. So we'll see what happens. But we will -- we will -- there definitely are musicians who are -- and they're usually interested. And it's always done with a sort of [foreign language], sort of work party/barn raising, that you'll perform, and then we'll eat. That's a little bit -- and when -- those years when the Consulate General has been able to -- and it has to do with their budgets, too, has been able to have his chefs do wonderful things, like [foreign language], and sort of basic Finnish happy -- comfort foods, and treasures. So those have been very -- they've been very, very successful. And sometimes, the students -- in a way, that when you have students who -- and -- but it always centers around the students. And so, that the students are either studying Finnish language and culture in Finnish language classes, but then also, I've taught a great many folk -- Kalevala [foreign language] and Finnish folklore classes, that those students become really quite knowledgeable about it in a way, from having read it. In a -- and then the -- once the -- that -- those courses can also be English, so that the translation comes in. And there are five excellent translations into English, and they can choose which they like best, which they find suits them best. But there also -- we've had sometimes 21 languages, sometimes 26 languages that have been -- including Hindi, including Quenya. Now, then came the whole notion of the Tolkien fans, who, these days, truly flock -- I mean, the past -- I'd say past 15 years, there have been many Tolkien specialists among the students. And they almost know their Tolkien by heart. I don't, but -- so one year, a student said, "Well, I'm learning Quenya on the -- on the internet, and there's a course. And I'm taking it. And I've learned quite a bit." And then, as she got bolder about -- learned more, then she said, "Now, for the Kalevala marathon, would it be really -- would it be okay, would it be dumb if I translated some of it into Quenya?" And the class said, "Why don't you? I mean, please do." So she chose the second rune, or second canto, where Sam Sapellervoinen [assumed spelling], a tiny lad, sows all the trees, and puts them into the -- and has them growing in the right kind of soil. It almost sounds like a forestry specialist's workbook, in -- because it lists the trees. And she said, "Oh, yeah, well, I'm doing it. It's just that Quenya doesn't have as many different names for trees, so I'll have to be kind of brief about it." And then, they -- then the -- her classmates encouraged her to -- well, you'll read that at the marathon, won't you? And she said, "Oh, yes. Yes, yes, I will." And she did, and it was a big hit. There were other Quenya in -- sort of oriented people there as well. And so the -- part of the -- and the students -- but then, it also gives the students agency, that Finnish is a -- sometimes not an easy challenge to get through. They also will need -- need a sense of -- that they can -- they can -- they can have a lot of say how it is done. So one year, particularly -- in 2005, I think it was. There was a class that was -- had one city planner, had very -- had one computer specialist, and they all took different parts on how to do it. And they just took it, and ran with it, and did it. And so their agency in putting on an event to which 90 performers came, and people appreciated their efforts -- also, everyone I could -- and yet, there was the affective effort -- effect of the -- of the music, of everything that went into the -- into the marathon was very helpful in their learning. So -- and my time is up. >> About. >> About. Okay. I shall then -- I shall then wrap up. There's a -- one starts thinking about -- there was a question of how -- I will then just say a couple of things. My new colleague, Haley Sylvia [assumed spelling], who has just started this year, is involved in a -- in an arrangement with Columbia where students at Yale and Cornell can take courses at Columbia if their universities don't offer it. And so she's teaching Finnish now, and they are using their virtual -- the virtual Yale person and the Cornell person are going to be also involved. Also, through the consortium of -- with Julliard School and others, people from other universities can also study Finnish at Columbia. And so it seems to be -- it's been a good start this year. And there are Tolkien fans, again, and -- so they are -- they're charging ahead. And maybe some of them will follow the footsteps of the earlier students who really have made major -- for whose careers the study of Finnish has been very central and important. So we keep on working. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Hillary Virtanen: My name is Hillary Virtanen, and I'm the assistant professor of Finnish and Nordic studies at Finlandia University in Hancock, Michigan. And my presentation is called "My Grandma Used To Say That: Finnish As A Heritage Language In The Upper Midwest." I also -- well, the camera's on, and my family will be watching this later. Happy birthday to my youngest sister, Erin -- my second-youngest sister. We'll call her the youngest. Thank you for letting me be out of town today. So the day was May 12th, 2017, and I had just arrived in Helsinki with my study abroad class from Finlandia University for a few weeks of observation, documentation, and interviewing, to learn about Finland's past, present, and future. My own excitement at returning to a country I know as a researcher and as an ethnic Finn from America was bolstered by the excitement of my students. Two of my three students were also ethnic Finns, and one was -- experienced her first moments on Finnish soil. I had already begun my process of re-acclimating myself to Finnish language by greeting our travel agent, Mikho [assumed spelling], and telling him all about our day layover in Iceland. As we settled into the bus, my attention turned to my student, Leia, who has Finnish heritage on both sides of her family. She had an intent expression on her face that I had seen others make before. She was drinking in the land her family had left over 100 years earlier for the first time. As we drove from the airport into Helsinki, we all looked around at the modern city, the cars, the Finnish and Swedish language road signs. [Foreign language] I heard the voice next to me, and nodded in agreement, until I realized that the person who quietly said to look was Leia, who had never spoken a word of Finnish to me in the conversational context. I looked at her in amazement, and she continued. "My grandma used to say that. That means look, right?" I smiled, and said, "Yeah, it does." Leia, in her first moments in Finland, was channelling what she knew of the language of the country that her family had left so long ago, but which hadn't entirely left them yet. It shouldn't be incredibly surprising that Leia, a young woman, would be able to recall words and their meaning in a language in which she was not fluent. Her home community in Houghton County, Michigan boasts the largest concentration of ethnic Finns outside of Finland, and over the past 100 years, Finnish language and culture have continued to have an important place in the community's private and public life. According to the 2013 U.S. Census American Community Survey estimate, just under 32% of Houghton County residents indicated Finnish as being either their primary or secondary ethnic ancestry. This means that, in this county, they are the largest -- they are the ethnic majority. As can be seen in this map that we can't see, but I can show you later if you're interested, Finnish ancestry is a rather common trait across the Lake Superior region, which includes Minnesota, Wisconsin, upper Michigan, and areas around Ontario, too. And so we affectionately know of this region as being the Sauna Belt. And if you ever need a sauna, just drive around. You'll see one. You can ask. In everyday terms, this means that Finnish culture is a visible part of the community for those who are Finnish or not. Finns, though originally heavily stigmatized as being undesirable, second-wave, eastern European immigrants in the late 1800s, have gradually come to a place of semi-esteem in the region, and have asserted pride in their culture in a number of ways. In Houghton County and places like it, towns with Finnish names like Doyvila [assumed spelling], Isanti, Tapiola and Oulu dot the map, though the pronunciation of these words may differ from how we would hear them in Finland. Businesses have Finnish names, either because of the proprietor's surname, or because of a conscious decision to use a Finnish name. Restaurants may offer Finnish baked goods, and churches originating from the Finnish State Lutheran Church or the Northern Nordic Laestadian Lutheran Movement are found in abundance in this region. And there are people who speak this language in varying degrees from native and near-native fluency to the use of a sprinkling of terms that maintained for a variety of reasons. And I will describe this variable situation for you in this paper. Finns began to come to the upper midwest starting in the 1860s, with work opportunities in mining as a result of the Civil War production and worker shortages. It is merely a coincidence that these migrants should have come to a place that is geographically so similar to Finland. A common idea among Finnish-Americans and those that learn about them is that this similarity drew the Finns, but this is not based in truth. It's perhaps rather a good deal of serendipity, especially when they started farming, and they knew exactly how to farm in a rocky, frozen place that has a super short growing season. When they came, they knew no English, and they were relegated to the hard labor jobs that required little talking beyond gestures, shouts indicating danger, and basic mining vocabulary learned on the job. Under these circumstances, it was rather common for Finnish-Americans to create a Finnish language community in order to meet their basic needs in their new setting. With a higher literacy rate than similar recently-arrived groups, Finns had the means to create their own infrastructure, and over the next half-century, Finnish language businesses, newspapers, temperance societies, churches, workers' halls and other concerns became rather common in the areas in which they settled. As many Finns still arrived to the towns that offered jobs, others were able to retreat into the countryside, and to create farming communities based on homesteads and stump farms created on the leavings of lumberjacks. Under these conditions, and due to the fact that Finnish was incomprehensible to any other linguistic community in the reason, Finnish was able to live on in some form for much longer than many of the other immigrant languages in the region. As Finns incorporated further into the local community, a unique transitional dialect known as Finglish or Fingliskad developed, merging Finnish and sometimes Swedish words with Finnish word order, phonetics and grammatical roles, and -- actually, Dan probably -- Dan has actually taught me a lot about Finglish. I really appreciate his early comments in some of my research when it first started out. So he probably has great things to say about it. So this language, to say the least, is extremely creative and fun to use. And an example of its creativity, which I don't have the visual graphic for, would be the sentence [foreign language]. Is there anybody here who knows what that means? Yes -- yeah. Because we were pushed into that [foreign language], right? Okay, so -- but -- so this is actually -- it takes English words and uses Finnish case ending rules. And so [foreign language] means to push. [Foreign language] is a baby buggy, and it's got the vestapt [phonetic], the genitive kind of form. You're going to push the whole thing. [Foreign language] means kitchen. So [foreign language] means from the kitchen, and [foreign language] is a bedroom. Into the bedroom. So you're pushing the baby buggy from the kitchen into the bedroom. And oh -- but now it's just the big TVs that don't work. That's okay. [ Laughter ] I'm allergic to computers, so it's -- you know. So the Finnish brought over by the immigrants also continued to live on in a number of areas of daily life. The children of immigrants, and their children, and so on, became further incorporated into English-speaking life through public education, employment, military service, inter-ethnic romances, and exposure to mass media and popular culture. In 1937, Finnish-American scholar John Komeinen [assumed spelling] notes these very factors in the language shift taking place among the children of immigrants. Sorry. I'm just going to turn this on, if it'll work. If not, I'll just keep talking. So anyway, John Komeinen in 1937 notes that these very factors are affecting language shift among the children of immigrants, though some token nods to continued use of Finnish, mostly through Finnish-American social organizations, were made. The pressures of Americanization were compounded by local inter-ethnic social problems, including suspicions against Finnish leftist political and labor organizations from the 1910s to the 1950s. >> Yay. >> Hillary Virtanen: Yay. So there's my sentence. So [foreign language] And so I wrote this, you know -- baby buggy, the B and P relation sound, and you can see the case endings that, of course, are quite famous in Finnish. [Foreign language], from the kitchen, that S-T-A that Dan had mentioned earlier, and then [foreign language], that extra A-N at the end of that word means that you're going into it. So these are very, very common Finnish-American sentences that you would hear, and that have nothing to do -- what is it, like, [foreign language], right? Like, yeah, something like that. So it'd be quite different in Finnish. Like, they're very kind of incomprehensible to each other. So I will scoot forward. So yes, this is, you know, some radical Finns up in upper Michigan. There were a lot of strikes that we end up seeing causing social problems with people. Oh, wait here -- sorry. Okay. So the pressures of Americanization are compounded by these local inter-ethnic problems, including suspiciousness against Finnish leftist political and labor organizations from the 1910s to the 1950s. In the upper midwest, this resulted from several divisive and deadly labor strikes, resultant blacklisting and general social deprecation of Finns, the residual effects which live on today in areas such as the copper country. To speak Finnish in public areas marked you as disloyal and radical at worst, and a provincial bumpkin at best. It -- this didn't, however, stop Finnish-Americans from using their language in several venues that were safe to -- safe to use it in, including the church and the home. From 1962 until 2014, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America maintained a special Suomi conference of the church to reflect the needs of Finnish ethnic parishioners. And people to this day still sing Christmas carols, make Finnish foods, take saunas, and use a variety of obscure Finnish and Finglish words to describe everyday things. This is where Finnish starts to come in as a heritage language. A heritage language, though often defined in many multiple ways by linguists, is meant here by me as being a language that a person recognizes as having a relationship with that person's own ethnic heritage, whether they speak any of it or not. So it has a significance to them as a part of their own kind of internal sense of culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, Finnish-Americans took part in a resurgence of ethnic identity that was also taking place among many other white Americans, and this is also after the Civil Rights Movement. So this was a whole period in American life when people were asserting different identities, and, you know, a lot of great, wonderful things came out of that. It was also an opportunity for these previously marginalized groups, including Finnish-Americans in the upper midwest, to look at their heritage in a new light. And this happened at about the same time that longstanding Finnish community groups, including temperance societies, Finnish-language churches, and consumer cooperatives, were having their last splash with the Finnish language, and were moving to primarily English-language groups, if not disbanding altogether. At this time, the loss of the language became a source of distress within the community, and they started throwing out ropes to rescue the language. The Salolampi Finnish Language Camp was one of the first, most concrete examples of an institution that was created specifically to teach Finnish language to youth in the ethnic group, and also outside the ethnic group. A lot of people from all walks of life have gone to Salolampi. It's a camp that's run by Concordia University in Morehead, Minnesota, and it provides a total immersive language learning environment in which English is not used. For many Finnish-American youth, this camp has become an important experience in their childhood. Finnish language has also been offered, at least since the 1970s, at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. I think -- was Boutier [assumed spelling] maybe the one who started that? >> '60s. >> Hillary Virtanen: '60s. Oh, okay. Good. >> Even before that. >> Hillary Virtanen: Even before that. But, yeah, it kind of really gets -- gets in there. And it's been taught off and on at Finlandia University, which was known as Suomi College until 2000, as well as the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So this means that ethnic Finns that live in the region have a wide variety of study options for, you know, local and regional universities. Community language classes have also been offered in varying degrees in small institutions across the midwest that have a stake in maintaining Finnish traditions in the everyday, including language. At the Finnish-American Heritage Center in Hancock, Michigan, for instance, community Finnish classes have been offered since the 1990s. In 2004, I undertook a survey of students currently or previously enrolled in the Finnish language classes offered in high schools in Houghton County, Michigan through a distance learning program. These schools created the distance learning program in order to increase course offerings in the rural schools of the area. It was an opportunity to understand both the cultural experiences of the students who studied Finnish, their attitudes toward the language, and their ideas for its future through their own interactions with it. High school Finnish is no longer offered in the Houghton County schools, unfortunately. Those students do have the opportunity to take it through community enrichment classes at Finlandia University, or in dual-enrollment programs through Finlandia University, but that's a little more difficult, just scheduling-wise, and also because it's a very rural area. So kids would have to drive pretty far for, you know, an hour-long class four times a week. High school foreign language classes are generally designed to create a certain level of fluency, and to provide a very minimal amount of cultural instruction. So if you've ever taken Spanish, or French, and any other language at a public school in the U.S., you know the basic formula for this. In the heritage context, however, there are added imperatives and interests, and value-added curricula address these concerns. Students attended concerts of Finnish folk music and participated in Finnish Independence Day celebrations. They conducted family history projects. One of these students is standing before you today, holding a Ph.D. in Scandinavian folklore, and taking my own students to Finland each year for their own discoveries and connections. So in my survey, I was connected -- I was concerned with the level and types of exposures students had to aspects of Finnish culture in America, including language, food ways, traditional arts, music, and popular culture from Finland. These students' experiences differ sharply from the experiences and motivations of non-ethnic students, who I've also taught at the University of Wisconsin and Finlandia. While Finnish popular culture and particularly heavy metal music typically attract non-Finns, Finnish-American students will often be completely unaware of Finnish pop culture, and may know about, if not completely identify with, the older Finnish-American culture of the 1940s and 1950s that their grandparents and other elders have presented as authentic. In the survey, nine of the 10 respondents explicitly cited their family heritage as being the motivating factor for them to study Finnish, and the student who didn't specifically say this actually provided answers that indicated that this was also the case for him or her. Students were interested in learning about Finland's history and culture, and many either had visited Finland or had hopes to do so. Their language exposure outside of class typically included the family use of small sets of vocabulary -- for instance, swear words or exclamations. A lot of us learned those as our first words, me included. Through their language study, they all increased their knowledge of Finland itself and of Finnish America. As these were anonymous surveys, I don't have the ability to track these respondents today, but they provide important clues to youth attitudes toward Finnish as a heritage language. For many of these, languages served to possibly rekindle the language, as their parents typically didn't speak Finnish, and many grandparents did. So a lot of students specifically said, "I can talk to my grandpa, and my mom and dad don't know what we're saying." So, I mean, I think grandpa's got some juicy gossip or something. So these surveys reveal the fact that there are these positive attitudes toward Finnish language that exist in Houghton County. Other, more observational, data also supports this. Periodic birth announcements in the local paper reveal that, over the past 15 years or so, Finnish names are popular with parents naming babies, and often, these names reflect a Finnish-American past, as opposed to naming trends in Finland today. So in 2013, I started teaching an introductory Finnish language community enrichment class at the Finnish-American Heritage Center, which I continued to teach for three years. These classes were organized into a fall term and a winter term, consisting of a weekly hour-long session meeting for a total of 10 weeks. So this is very low contact, right? And when I first designed this class, I did so with very little prior knowledge of how to go about it, and how it would work out in reality. And so as my teaching continued, I learned a lot about the adult motivations for studying Finnish, and about the context and dialects in which adults were exposed to language. The majority of my students were locals of Finnish heritage above the age of 50, though the classes did also attract community residents outside of the heritage. And these are two of them. And -- Marvin and Rebecca, actually. And so these people typically who were outside of the heritage community were going to go visit Finland, or they were just curious about the language, and they had -- you know, just kind of a general avocational interest. Several times, parents or grandparents also enrolled with a child or grandchild, and so my youngest student was about eight years old, and my oldest students were in their 70s. One of the challenges I first discovered in this class was that each term was essentially a fresh start, which meant that I had to start each term at the very beginning with Finnish alphabet and basic pronunciation rules, though many people caught on very quickly, or had previous exposure to it. And so, each term, the entire six terms that I taught included students who also previously enrolled in a class. So one student took four or five terms with me. And -- you know, this -- I was like, oh, gosh, I better teach him some other words, right? So several others came close to this attendance record, too. And because of this, I designed my classes to start with the basic pronunciation and greetings, introductions, that kind of vocabulary, and then I rotated the rest of the lesson sets around so that students enrolling in multiple years would get a wider variety of vocabulary sets. So I would include things like travel, work, food, home life, family and friends, animals, all kinds of stuff like that. But that way, you wouldn't just be getting the same thing from me every time. Several times, my academic training in Finnish language came at odds with the daily language that my students heard in the home. Our food unit, for instance, often had people mention other words they knew instead, making them wonder if they knew the wrong word. The word "fork," for instance, [foreign language], caused one student, very crestfallen to ask, "So you mean it's not [foreign language]? That's the word we used at home." This example made me incredibly excited, because it revealed another dimension of Finnish language use in the community, in which Swedish words were Finnicized. The word she had used for the fork came from the Swedish [foreign language]. No, you're not wrong at all. Your family must've come from a region that had contact with Swedish. That word is likely from the Meankieli dialect, which is really interesting. And that's a really beautiful dialect of Finnish. Like, that's exciting. So, you know, I got exposure to these kind of things all the time. The word potato also caused a lot of problems. [Laughter] They -- I always say [foreign language], and they always say [foreign language]. So, as I continued my teaching, it became clear early on that fluency was not the object for the vast majority of students. They realized they were beyond the peak language acquisition years of youth. So for them, instead, the emotional component was much more important. They wanted to understand the words to hymns and nursery rhymes that they remembered. They wanted to talk about food they still ate, and about cousins they had visited in Finland. The language class was a window to a whole world of Finnishness in which they were active participants. Our class was a farm for nostalgia, and for making connections between the Finnish-American experience and Finnishness itself. Sometimes, the simple act of rolling our ehrs [phonetic] and saying ah, ih, ew [phonetic] in rapid succession was what was most important. Sometimes reflecting on the Finland of today and the Finland that their ancestors knew was what was most important. So one fall afternoon, in 2012, I walked into Karvakko's Market in Tapiola, Michigan with the rather unusual task of picking up deer tongues that had been promised to my husband for use in a pate he planned to make in a Finnish cooking workshop. So I married a man who's not Finnish at all, but he has come to be a wonderful Finnish cook. So if you ever need one, and you're in Hancock, give me a call. A man maybe about 15 years older than I entered, and began a conversation with the store proprietor, who appeared to be in his 60s. And they spoke completely in Finnish. So I grabbed a few other items and waited for their conversation to end so I could ask for these deer tongues. And periodically, the men would cast mischievous glances my way, and I could tell that they really enjoyed their talking in front of an unfamiliar woman in what they assumed to be a secret language. Their conversation was mundane, and not offensive, and so I let them have their fun until another glance with a big grin came my way, and I decided to call their game. [Foreign language]. So, we speak Finnish here, then? Their smiles erupted into laughter, and they switched into English. I admitted that my grandfather was from just up the road, and they promptly gave me hugs and handshakes, and shared memories of Frannie Virtanen. Finnish lives in pockets. Often at about 10 a.m. on weekdays, you can find a small group of elders speaking together in Finnish over coffee at a local bakery in Houghton. You can find Finnish hymns sung at Laestadian religious services, and at funerals for members of the Ladies of Kaleva, which is a Finnish-American fraternal order. It is used symbolically on bumper stickers. It is a resource for those needing particularly satisfying swear words, and it is a greeting to use when native Finns visit the Upper Peninsula a minute -- upper Midwestern Finnish communities. It comes out in local Finnish-American festivals, on Saturday night saunas, and in the kitchen, baking [foreign language]. Though researchers have anticipated a day when Finnish will no longer be spoken in the long-time Finnish stronghold of the upper midwest, in ways great and small, it still persists. And it serves as a window to a culture that persists as well. That's all, folks. [ Applause ] >> Well, in the interests of time, we have two things that I thought we could go on with. Questions from the audience, and then the Embassy has provided an amusing video about Finnish language. So I thought if people still have time -- I don't know how long the Embassy video is, but -- >> It's just about one minute. >> Couple of minutes? Okay. Should we do that now, to kind of freshen our minds? >> Oh, boy. [ Music ] >> Okay. [Foreign language]. >> I don't know how to say this all at once. [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] >> That was good, right? >> What is this? >> I have no idea. None. >> I think it's some kind of helicopter. >> A gift card for a hot-air balloon flight? >> Oh. >> Huh. >> Jet engine mechanics student. >> How do you fit that on a business card? >> I thought, like, his resume is long. >> That's the hardest word I'll ever pronounce, but now I know where to -- how to buy my hot-air balloon gift card, next time I go back to Finland. >> But it's -- in Finnish, it's one word. >> Oh, my God. >> Time is kind of running out, so we'll just take questions from the audience, and then we'll ask questions from each other, if we still have a few minutes. Okay? >> One of the tags here was the future of the Finnish language, and I think I heard two mixed messages. You said, well, if there's a border, the language is a little more firmed up, and a little more held together, too. And you said not so many people are really learning it anymore. I think you said that. It's kind of reaching back into their family history, but less of a -- not as many people learn Finnish to learn Finnish. And most of those students will -- so that's in the U.S. context. >> Daniel Karvonen: Mm-hmm. >> But in Finland, is the Finnish language holding strong? Are there lots of books published, and newspapers published to reinforce its continued existence, or do you think it's in danger? >> Did everybody hear the question? >> Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Daniel Karvonen: Well, I would say that Finnish is not an endangered language at all. I mean, it's -- you don't -- >> Alli Flint: Uh-unh, no. No. >> Daniel Karvonen: As -- the real barometer of it is if you go to someone's home, and if they're speaking it to their children, then it's doing really well. And, you know, the minute that stops happening, then -- then there's a change. One thing that people have talked about is, in Finland, there's so much at higher levels -- so, for example, in universities, there are a lot of programs now that are taught only in English. And there is a little bit of concern in Finland about sort of higher-level research not being conducted as much in Finnish anymore, but being conducted in English simply because the audience -- if you write a paper, you write a dissertation in Finnish, you -- think about writing a dissertation in Finnish. Okay, number one, just think about who -- who's the audience for a dissertation in the first place? Is pretty small. And then you think a dissertation in Finnish, which is a potential population of five and a half million, but that's not your dissertation audience, right? It's very small. So a lot of people now, the kind of upper research will be done in English. So there's a little bit of sort of maybe loss of English in -- Finnish in certain higher-level domains like that, but not at all, for example, in government, or not at all in, you know -- in education at other levels. So I would say really there isn't -- you know. I mean, the influx of English into Finnish is not the worry, because those words are adapted, as you saw. They don't say just shave. They say [foreign language]. It becomes a Finnish word. And then, in 100 years, no one will ever know that that was an English word. >> Hillary Virtanen: And could actually -- could I just make one comment really quick about the way it's living in the upper midwest? There's a lot of really small words that live on, and a lot of people do things like nicknaming. You know, if you don't have a Finnish name, you get a Finnish nickname. I have a cousin named Matt. His name's Mahtie [phonetic]. You know, I'm Helavie [phonetic]. And then there's words like -- for instance, my kids didn't know what the English word for bellybutton was until they went to school. We also say [foreign language] at home. And so, you know, they went to school, and they're -- came home, and they're like, "Mom, what's a bellybutton? Like, what is that?" And -- and so, there's a lot of these words that continue to exist, and, you know, sauna words and stuff like that. Like, those won't die. So even though we aren't speaking Finnish every day, and even though the kids aren't learning it at home, which is the key thing -- at least -- a lot of the kids aren't homing -- learning it at home, there's these words that continue to live, very bafflingly, you know. >> Ma'am, as followup to what you just said, does it seem, though, that in almost every language in the world, or every country, when you're getting to the very higher levels, you're going to do papers in English? >> Daniel Karvonen: Right. >> But the two nuclear scientists in Helsinki are still going to be speaking Finnish to each other when they're discussing their research. >> Daniel Karvonen: Presumably, although I have run across Finns who sometimes find it difficult to talk about their own research in Finnish, because all of the work that they've done, all the writing that they've done, all the reading they've done, and all the international collaboration they've done is in English. So they just sometimes lack the terms. >> Yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: Because they're not familiar with the terms in Finnish, or maybe the terms in Finnish don't exist. Because it's so -- if it's incredibly specific, you know, I've -- I run into that in linguistics, where certain people will be -- in a particular theoretical framework, they don't know the exact technical terms. >> Sure, yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: And so people are always trying to come up with them, and make those words so that people can. But yeah, I mean, if they're talking about something that isn't so technical, of course, it'll be in Finnish. Of course. I mean, two Finnish people with -- why would they speak English? It would be exhaust -- it would be -- you know, it's way harder. >> [Inaudible] Okay, one -- I have two questions. One is totally politically incorrect, okay, and the other one is for you, Dan. Okay, you -- I appreciate it, and I think you highlighted very much what is difficult or considered difficult. But there is one thing that you completely omitted, which is the significance of [foreign language], which is a spoken language. We have a situation in Finnish, the same as in Arabic. There's language -- say, modern, standard Arabic. Nobody speaks that. The same is true in Finland. >> Daniel Karvonen: Absolutely. >> If you offer a scripted speech, including the President -- he's a little pompous ass, so he can make -- written language, but most of the Ministers will switch to spoken language. >> Daniel Karvonen: Right. Of course. >> The form is very different. >> Daniel Karvonen: Of course. >> How do you deal with that in -- with your students? That difficult. Let me -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Totally agree. I totally agree. >> Yeah. But today, the Department of Education has issued materials, because there is an immigration, and refugee problems, and all of that. Now, the materials that are issued by the Department of Education, they published them in spoken language. The videos are in spoken language. The transcripts of the videos are now written in spoken language. How do you deal with that in here? >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah. Here, you mean in my teaching? >> In -- well, in America, because that adds a dimension. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I always say to the students, "You're getting two for the price of one." Because they're learning the spoken language and the written language. Because you're absolutely right. That -- for people that don't know, I mean, English spoken language and English written language are not that different. >> No, they aren't. >> Daniel Karvonen: And Finnish written language and spoken language are very different. >> Very different. >> Daniel Karvonen: I mean, it's just mind-boggling sometimes, when -- you know, and in the old days, the traditional way of teaching Finnish was that you -- all of the textbooks taught only written language and no spoken language. And my predecessor, for example, at the University of Minnesota, she refused to teach spoken language, even though she spoke it, of course. But she refused to teach it. So the students would go to Finland, be perfectly well understood by everybody, but then, when the Finns spoke to them, they couldn't understand anything. So it was a one-way sort of intelligibility that was going on. Nowadays, the teaching materials are much better, and they have -- the teaching materials that I use incorporate spoken language along the way, although I would say not enough. And, in fact, I -- you know, one of my goals is to, you know, write a -- my own textbook in collaboration with a Finn. And one of the things that I would like to do is start with the spoken language exactly. Because that is the way -- that is the -- that is every Finn's home language, is spoken language. When a little kid says, "Mom, let's go," or -- no, let's say, "We are going where? Where are we going? We are going -- " They don't say [foreign language]. No three-year-old kid is going to say [foreign language]. They're going to say [foreign language]. And that's just the way it is. And that should be the first form that the kid learns -- I mean, the student learns, too. Because they are most likely to encounter that in speaking with a Finnish person. So I would like to kind of throw that -- exactly what -- they've been -- they're doing this in Finland now. They're actually starting with the spoken language. So I think it's -- I think it's the right thing to do, and I'd like to start that. But you could also -- instead of using the written language, and then -- and then bringing in the spoken language little by little, start with the spoken language, and bring in the written little by little. And actually, make it task-appropriate. So, for example, if you're -- if you're doing a Facebook post, then teach them how to write that in spoken language. If they're writing a formal business thing, teach them how to write it in written language. So make the -- and if they're speaking a dialogue, have that be spoken language. If they're doing a formal job interview, make the language more formal. Like, make the -- make the style of the language fit the task, or fit the everyday sort of context that they're using it -- >> Now can I ask the politically incorrect question? And it's mostly to you, Alli. >> Alli Flint: Yeah? >> Which is that I wonder if, in America, American Finns, political correctness needs to be fought in today's society. Right? We agree on that. There's too much political correctness and emphasis on that. In Finland -- Finland is ranked very, very high in freedom of speech, very high internationally. It was number one for a long time. Now I think it's number two. Kalevala was a politically correct thing, published 1835. Sole purpose of it was nation-building, to get us to be recognized as an independent duchy of Russia, not part of Sweden. Okay? Now, Loennrot collected poems, tons more. The selection that was chosen for Kalevala was the politically correct selection. Now they are in National Archives, the ones that Loennrot collected, and there are attempts to publish those now. For instance -- and this is so that -- how could we have babies if we didn't deal with sex? Okay? There are tons and tons of poems that explicit -- because sex is not a taboo in Finland, okay? >> Alli Flint: Anymore. Okay, 1800s, I tell you, no, it would have been. [Laughter] >> So not in those poems, and not in Kalevala poems, in the thousands of them. They are going to publish them, sex in Kalevala. They're going to National Archives. How will the American community stay in touch with the -- how Finns now interpret their sacred things, like Kalevala? >> Alli Flint: First of all, I would take -- I would possibly not agree with you fully on that it was only for its role -- that it was being published solely for -- >> Nation-building. >> Alli Flint: -- nation-building. Because, in a way, what we -- we did have -- there were folklorists before Loennrot, Denandev [assumed spelling] who also had been -- studied -- was medical doctor, was -- became a folklorist, became a lexicographer the way Loennrot did. And so that there was the -- and it was -- start -- in a way, it was while Finland was still part of Sweden. There was an interest in the Swedish Court, in fact, for collecting the grand -- the old -- the value of old oral tradition was being seen as a possibly important thing. It certainly was also central European, German influence. So that there was really -- it was not just one purpose. It was -- it was been -- in a way, Kalevala became rather sort of politically used to an extent for that. But it was much more than that. It was, in a way, distilling -- >> The collection, yes. The collection of poems was -- >> Alli Flint: Right. But -- But also -- also, that then -- this was -- we have to then look at Loennrot's work. To my mind, we have to look at -- he was -- he saw himself very much more as one of the singers, and he was also part of [foreign language], who had immersed himself so much in the -- in the poetry that he was collecting. And the songs, really -- they were always songs, basically, except the -- some -- some things were, quote unquote, prose without music. But most really had a -- had also a tune to them, so that there was the artistic expression there. So I would say that the -- that you could -- you can look at Kalevala from so many different -- different points of view. Now, as far as -- as far as what Americans would think about now something being published that's very explicit, about sex, I don't know. I don't know. Who knows? Whether those Americans would learn enough Finnish to really actually read that -- whether there's anyone who would want to publish -- fund such research, I don't know. That's -- that's -- >> We'll wait for the [inaudible] that wants to be published in a year or two. >> Yes. To Daniel, your interesting presentation about layers, oh, there is -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Right. >> Language [inaudible], anyways. The last one was the English, and you presented a whole number of others. Finland has a Language Council, of course, and I wonder how many of words really have been approved for [laughter]. And I would say that -- >> Daniel Karvonen: That's a good joke. >> [Inaudible] take off that are perfectly Finnish words, which are now being used as an English version [inaudible] translated into Finnish. [Inaudible] I think there is responsibility for linguists and others also to try to use the Finnish, if there exists one. There's many perfectly correct words, which are even shorter -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Sure. Right. >> -- than the English word. So I wonder whether the role of the linguists should be to maintain the language and not accept some [inaudible] >> Daniel Karvonen: What? [Laughter] I know. Alli and I are like -- >> Alli Flint: Yeah. >> Hillary Virtanen: Yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: Well, okay, I would say as a linguist, as a trained linguist, I -- I'm a -- I'm not a prescriptive linguist. I'm a descriptive linguist. So basically, we just -- we just look at language as a phenomenon, and study it, and we don't prescribe. Right? So the -- you know, the board that decides on what is a Finnish word and what isn't a Finnish word, what should be -- that's a totally different thing. And those kinds of boards -- like, in France, too, the same thing. We don't have one for English, for example, but in France, they have one. They can -- they can prescribe all day long, but they cannot control what people say on the street. And the mystery -- and the mystery of why one word -- like, a native word versus a word -- a loan word sticks, nobody really understands. Sometimes it is length, but there's -- sometimes, there's something about -- people have extremely strong feelings, emotional feelings about words. Oh, I wouldn't use that word because it just sounds a little something, or that just sounds better. And so, you know, you think about, like, [foreign language], there's -- there's -- that's just a normal thing to say now. >> You heard about [inaudible] >> Daniel Karvonen: Yes, [foreign language], all the time. All the time. You ask any 20-year-old, that's what they say, [foreign language]. Right? Yeah, I know. I know, and there's a perfectly good -- [foreign language], but that's just, like, a -- a -- this is -- >> Alli Flint: Old folks do that, right? >> Daniel Karvonen: Yes. And so, this is one of those things that there's a perfectly good Finnish way, but you can't control what people are going to say. And then, when you get this younger people growing up, they don't -- they don't even think of it as something necessarily from English. It's just what they say. And again, you know, Finnish is not going to be -- is not the same it was 100 years ago, will not -- even 50, won't be 50 years in the future, 100 years. We have no idea what direction it'll go. But -- >> [Inaudible] factory, there are large differences between coming from [inaudible], and those who are -- who are Germanic [inaudible]. So in other parts of Finland, the words may be different. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yes. Abso -- >> Huge place. >> Daniel Karvonen: Very, very true. Regional variation is huge, too. I mean, it is in the United States, but it is in Finland. It's very -- it's very big. But there is -- there is a certain level of commonality, where certain words that all Finns will recognize and feel comfortable with. And then, you know, there definitely is, you know -- in Helsinki, for example, there's maybe a little bit more influence than other -- I know the TAs that I work with, some of them are from -- I get a full right language teaching assistant every year. And I have lived in Helsinki when I had been in Finland, so that's the kind of Finnish that I speak, but the ones that don't live there, sometimes they don't use the words that I say. Because they say, "Oh, that's so Helsinki." Absolutely. >> Alli Flint: Yeah, yeah. And that's not necessarily a plus for you. >> Daniel Karvonen: No. [Laughter] It's not a compliment. >> Alli Flint: No, no, it's not. That is not a compliment to you, by the people who say -- for example, when students go to Finland, and then I explain, yeah, well, so-and-so is going to be in Kuopio, or Yoandso [phonetic], oh, good, away from Helsinki. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah. >> Alli Flint: So we -- I mean, Finland has its, you know, regional loyalties, for sure. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah. >> Alli Flint: And -- and then, also, the symbolism of what it means. >> Daniel Karvonen: Right. >> Hillary Virtanen: Right? >> Okay, we're running out of time. So maybe two more questions. Yeah? >> Okay, mine is actually another question about what she say about the [foreign language]. The form I heard, [foreign language] so he shaved off a little bit. So he [inaudible] they use it there, too. >> Daniel Karvonen: Mm-hmm. >> That if they gave me a little less money, they shaved some, or -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Right. >> Alli Flint: Right. >> Daniel Karvonen: You're right. So it's extension of the word. Yeah. Yeah, right. You know -- >> So it sort of lives on, and takes forms that are also used in English, but then it changes slightly, and -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Right. And at a certain point, all of us become a little unaware of how people 10 years younger, 20 years younger, 30 years younger are speaking, and we don't -- aren't so in-tune with it. I mean, the best way -- when I go to Finland, I like to, like, ride the bus and sit in the back. >> Alli Flint: Yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: So then I can hear what the teenagers are saying. Then I can get -- kind of get in, you know, hear what people are saying. Otherwise, I don't have contact with that. >> Alli Flint: Can I do a very short test? I just read it very recently, a woman saying, "I don't really want -- [foreign language]." Do we have any sense of what that might possibly mean? It took me a while -- moment there, looking at it. It was a person dealing with -- her mother had died, and there was the home with all the things that had been in mother's life. And then, she was saying, "Oh, well, I mean, they say one should [foreign language], but since it didn't happen, we now have all of these." Okay, that should be a slight semantic hint. [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] >> Alli Flint: [Foreign language]. I had -- I really looked at it, and I said, okay, now, [foreign language]. Are we doing moneymakers, or what are we doing here? [Foreign language], the Japanese -- >> Oh, wow. >> Alli Flint: Organizer. So this had become a Finnish word. >> Daniel Karvonen: Wow. >> Alli Flint: So -- not that you start using it, because you maybe don't [foreign language], but -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Wow. >> Alli Flint: But -- so I thought -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Sure. >> Alli Flint: -- but it's -- you -- the minute you think about it a little bit, having done a lot of work in sort of lexicon, particularly from the structure of meaning, I thought, okay, well, now this has got to mean something. So, okay, the only thing I could do was to figure out -- >> One last question. >> I have a very, very basic question. Since the Finns call their country Suomi, where did -- what's the derivation of the word Finn? >> Hillary Virtanen: Take it away. [Foreign language] >> Daniel Karvonen: Well, so, there's two answers to that question. So -- >> We have a linguist here. We can ask her. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah, go ahead. >> Well, we have Suomi, [foreign language]. They are all related, are coming from the [inaudible] language. [Foreign language] over there, on that northern [inaudible] on the -- Asia. And you had a wonderful map of the heavy concentration of the Uralic peoples, or Uralic language speaker, or the haplo DNA. Not only language, but the human DNA that is so [inaudible] >> Question was, what -- >> Daniel Karvonen: No. No. No. It's older. >> [Inaudible] that this is the -- yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah, it's [inaudible] >> I am part of the eastern Finns, and then the others are from the west. And you will clearly see it even in the body structure, in dental structure, and almost in the DNA. So anyway, [foreign language] is the Lapp language. That's also the same. [Foreign language], Suomi, [foreign language], and there's some [inaudible] >> Finland in English -- >> Daniel Karvonen: But let me just say that the -- the -- so the actual -- so the ety -- so, okay, to answer your questions about Finns, so that's Tacitus, so -- wrote about people living in the north a couple thousand years ago, about people living in the north wearing furs for clothing, and referred to them as the Fenni, F-E-N-N-I. And that is where the word Finland came from. So that's a very old word that came -- and we don't know if he was really writing about the Finns, but it was people in the north that that became associated with Finland. Pardon? >> Hillary Virtanen: Yeah, associated with Finns or Sami. >> Daniel Karvonen: Or the Sami, or the Sami. Now, the derivation of -- the etymology of the word Suomi is really shrouded in mystery, and there are two -- couple hypotheses. One of them is that there's a province in Finland called Hame, which some people have said that Suomi and Hame are originally from the same word. And so it's one region of Finland that then -- the S had changed -- the H changed to an S, or whichever way, and then that became generalized for the whole country. Another theory that's been proposed -- you know, etymology is conjecture. >> Alli Flint: Yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: There are no firm answers with -- when it comes to etymology, rarely do you have the final word, unless you have some kind of text. But with Finnish, we don't have that depth of text, right? So it's a lot of conjecture, and it's just someone has a better guess than someone else. One of the other suggestions that's been proposed is the old Latvian word [foreign language], which means earth, and that Suomi and [foreign language] come -- the word for Suomi actually is a Baltic loan word. [Laughter] So, the -- what the really interesting answer to that question is -- about Suomi, we don't know for sure. But those are a couple hypotheses, and for Finland, it's Fenni. And in -- the word Suomi is used -- the Estonians and the Latvians both use a variant of Suomi to call Finland. There aren't other -- many other countries in the world -- >> Alli Flint: Yeah, Suomi. Yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah, [foreign language], and I think [foreign language], I think is what they say in Latvian. >> Alli Flint: Yeah. >> Hillary Virtanen: Yeah. >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah. So, yeah, great question. >> Well, thank you very much. So thank you very much -- >> Daniel Karvonen: Yeah, thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.

Channel: Library of Congress

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Length: 126min 49sec (7609 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018