# Finnish and Swedish: Mutual Intelligibility



## shaloo

Dear foreros & foreras,

I would like to understand how mutually intelligible are Finnish and Swedish, as in how much can a Finn actually understand written and spoken Swedish. And how about the speaking part?

Kindly throw some light on the same.

Cheers!


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## jazyk

Probably none, since Swedish and Finnish are not related. I know, though, that many Finns study and speak Swedish, which explains why they understand Swedes.


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## shaloo

Thanks jazy, for replying so quick!  
Are there any internationally accepted certifications that acknowledge a non-native's proficiency in Swedish?


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## sakvaka

Jazyk is correct; Swedish and Finnish belong to different language groups, and even though we have borrowed words from our neighbours (and vice versa), the languages are (almost) as different as Chinese and Hindi (the Latin script is used in the both, though).

Secondly: Finland is a bilingual country, and the both languages are studied at school (however, more or less eagerly). There are areas in western and southern Finland where Swedish is the most common language.


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## Gafudo

In fact Swedish belongs to the same family as Norwegian or Danish, whereas Finnish nobody knows exactly where comes from (is very similar to Estonian and is a far relative of Hungarian).
As far as I´ve seen, Swedish gramatical structure is not very different than the English one, and there are many words that are similar than in German, so a person that knows English and German can understand (60%) Swedish. However, you can know speak 10 languages and don´t understand absolutely nothing of a Finnish text, for me is like Chinesse.
An example. "Telephone" is very similar in all European languages (spanish, italian, french, portuguese, german, english, greek...). In finnish is "puhelin"   :-S


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## Gavril

Another problem with mutual intelligibility is that Finnish doesn't seem to use international words as much as Swedish does. (I'm not certain of this, given my lack of Swedish experience, but it's the impression I've gotten.) The word for "telephone" (_puhelin_) is one example of this. Also:

"nature": F. _luonto_, Sw. _natur

_"grammar": F. _kielioppi, _Sw._ grammatik_

"radar": F. _tutka_, Sw. _radar_

"tradition": F. _perinne, _Sw. _tradition_

Even when Finnish does use international words, it's common for there to be a native alternative: _musiikki _vs. _säveltaide, immuniteetti _vs. _vastutuskyky, geeni _vs. _perintötekijä_, etc.


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## shaloo

Thanks so much everyone! This gives me a better picture about both the languages... I also heard that Finnish is one of the hardest languages in the europe region (of all the romance/germanic/uralic/slavic language families, for e.g.) 
Given that you know English and/or one or more Romance/Germanic languages doesn't help you much in learning Finnish. How true do you think is this comment?


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## hollabooiers

shaloo said:


> Given that you know English and/or one or more Romance/Germanic languages doesn't help you much in learning Finnish. How true do you think is this comment?



That would be very true. Finnish just isn't related to any IE languages like English ergo they don't have much in common with each other ergo knowing English won't help you with learning Finnish.  Germanic and Romance languages are more use when learning Russian for example, cause they're at least related to one another.


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## Gavril

hollabooiers said:


> That would be very true. Finnish just isn't related to any IE languages like English ergo they don't have much in common with each other ergo knowing English won't help you with learning Finnish.  Germanic and Romance languages are more use when learning Russian for example, cause they're at least related to one another.



This is slightly off-topic, but, I doubt that Russian is any easier for a Romance/Germanic speaker to learn than Finnish. Russian is an IE language, but its relationship to English (to use one example) isn't obvious from comparing the majority of Russian and English words. On the basis of word similarity, Swedish and Finnish may even be more mutually intelligible than Russian and English: 

F. _villa, _Sw. _ull _"wool"; cf. English_ wool_, Russian _sherst'_
F. _hylly, _Sw. _hylla_ "shelf"; Eng. _shelf, _Russ. _polka_
F. _pelata_, Sw. _spela _"play"; Eng. _play, _Russ. _igrat'
_
etc.


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## hollabooiers

Well yes, Finnish would have a lot of Swedish loans, that's historically inevitable, so for a Swede when it comes to vocabulary, Russian would probably indeed be harder to learn than Finnish. But then again, Russian has a lot of loans that Finns have their own words for:

Eng. _telephone_, Rus. _telefon_, F. _puhelin_
Eng. _football_, Rus. _futbol_, F. _jalkapallo_
Eng. _composer_, Rus. _kompozitor_, F. _säveltäjä_

I haven't done any research on which of the two has loaned more and from which languages, so you might well be right about this. However, I'm sure you'll agree that for the large part, both Finnish and Russian words seem insane for a non-Slavic IE speaker anyway and leaving vocabulary aside, structurally Russian should be easier for all non-Slavic IE natives. Russian and other IE languages are flective, Finnish and other Finno-Ugric languages are agglutinative, so the whole concept of conveying a meaning is drastically different. Not to mention that while both have weird grammatical aspects, Finnish tends to go more over board with them, for example Russian has six cases, while Finnish has 15.

Of course I'm not a native IE speaker, so I don't really have much say in this.  I do -speak- English, Finnish and Russian, but I guess that doesn't really count.


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## Sepia

shaloo said:


> Thanks so much everyone! This gives me a better picture about both the languages... I also heard that Finnish is one of the hardest languages in the europe region (of all the romance/germanic/uralic/slavic language families, for e.g.)
> Given that you know English and/or one or more Romance/Germanic languages doesn't help you much in learning Finnish. How true do you think is this comment?


 
Of course it would help you. Having learned any language with a very complex grammar always helps you when learning more, because you'll have acquired a certanin methodology in your research and in learning.

The more languages you have learned, the easier it comes to learn more.

But take it as a fact. The only thing Finnish has to do with any of the Western European languages is that it is one more language that is spoken by humans. If it is more difficult than any other all depends on you starting point. If you speak Estonian, it is probably quite easy. If you speak Danish and are learning it as your first foreign language it is probably difficult. Unless you happen to have a certain mindset that makes the way of thinking that is needed to learn it, easier. Nobody can tell, except you, after trying it out.


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