FINNISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Finnish language is used by the people known as Finns, inhabiting Finland, or dispersed throughout Lapland, the Baltic provinces, parts of Russia proper, both banks of the middle Volga, through Perm,, Vologda, West Siberia, and Hungary, and constituting the western branch of the great Urato-Altaic family. There are five groups: 1. The Finns proper; 2. The Lapps; 3. The Peruvian Finns; 4. Volga Finns; 5. Ugrian Finns. 1. The first group comprises the Suomi or Suomelaisset, i.e., Finn men, who occupy nearly all Finland except a portion on the gulf of Bothnia, where Swedish is spoken; next, the Karelians, who extend from Russian Lapland s. to the gulf of Finland and lake Ladoga, and e. to the White sea and the shores of lake Onega; thirdly, the Chudic, a Slav term often applied to the whole group, but now restricted to the Veps, or northern Chud, and the Voltic or southern Chud, dwelling in scattered communities on the shores of lake Onega; and lastly, the Baltic Finns, including the Esthe or Esthonian, occupying the greater part of the southern coast of the gulf of Finland and the northern halt of Livonia, and the Livonian or Krevinian, occupying a small corner in the n.w. of Cou•land. 2. The Lapps occupy the extreme n.w. of Russia, and some parts of northern Sweden and Norway. 3. The Permian Finns comprise the Siryenians, occupying an extensive region between 00° n. and the Arctic circle, and 50' e. and the Ural mountains, but mainly in the section of the government of Vologda; the Permian proper, formerly dif fused throughout Perm, Vialka, Oufa, etc., now •surviving in isolated communities mainly about the upper Kama; and the Votyak, occupying a relatively compact terri tory in Viatka as far n. as Glazov on the river Tchepsa. 4. The Volga Finns include the Cherremissian on the left bank of the Volga, from a little w. of Kasan to near Nijni-Novgorod; and the Nordivinian, divided into small communities on both banks of the Volga, about Simbirsk, Samara, Stavropot, and Tambar. 5. The Ugrian Finns include the Voguls, extending from the Ural mountains e. to near the river Obi, and s.
to Tobolsk; the Ostyaks, from the Voguls e. to the river Yenissei, between Turuchausk and Yenisseisk, and from the Arctic circle to 59° n. ; and the Magyars of Hungary. These five groups form one linguistic family, to which Samoyede is related. The richest and most highly cultivated languages of the family are the Suomi and Magyar. The dialects are all distinctly agglutinative forms of speech, with decided tendencies towards true inflection, so much so that in many grammatical endings the essential difference between agglutination and inflection becomes obscured. As in other Urato-Altaic tongues, progressive vowel-harmony forms a characteristic feature of the Finnish group. Rask considered the Finnish language the most sonorous and harmonious of tongues. It is maintained by some that the Finnish languages represent the oldest forms among the Urato-Altaic groups. There is strong evidence that the Finns, or a closely allied race, must have at one time, probably prehistoric, been spread over a considerable area of central, if not of western Europe. The Finnish language is spoken by over 2,000,000 people, and in three different dialects, viz., the East Finnish or Karelian, the South Finnish, and the West Finnish. The first of these is the oldest and least developed; the second is the main vehicle of Finnish literature. It is emphatically vocalic. It has five fundamental vowels—a, e, i, o, and u—and employs 12 diphthongs. The gram matical relations between the several parts of speech are expressed exclusively by suf fixes. Nouns are used without any article; have no gender; and are declined, both in singular and plural, through 15 different cases, so as to express the relations which in the Indo-Germanic languages are sometimes indicated by prepositions. Verbs have but two tenses, present and past, the future tense being expressed by a circumlocution; but their conjugation is very intricate. The language is capable of expressing the nicest shades of meaning.