A couple of weeks ago, Helsinki’s daily paper Helsingin Sanomat published an article called “Lauri Lassila huomasi, että osa hänen ystävistään ei osaa puhua enää suomea, vaikka haluaisikin” (Lauri Lassila noticed that his friends can’t speak Finnish anymore, even though they want to). It might seem like a harmless article about the youths. But as usual with this kind of article, there are some malicious messages in it. Let’s take a look at why this article should never have been written.
First, the (little bit of) good news
The people interviewed in this article are taking an interest in language. Hooray! They should enroll in the university to study the subject. Or get in touch with some of the linguists that work there. I’m sure they could tell them about resources to check out. The city library system has lots of books on language and linguistics. Just stay away from anything written by this huijari.
Now for the (pile of) bad news
These guys should not have been asked about this topic. They clearly don’t know what they are talking about or how to talk about it.
We all know why Helsingin Sanomat published this article – for those sweet, sweet clicks, babyyyyy. Complaining about English invading a language is a broken record in European journalism at this point. The Greeks do it (even though they shouldn’t), the Germans do it (again, incorrectly), the Italians do it (because they’re currently playing all the old fashy hits), you know the French do it (one of them is even claiming that English is just badly pronounced French lollll). Heck, even the British complain about other English speakers ruining their English (even though, duh, they’re not). And the Finnish media has reported on this several times in the last couple of years – despite being told by Finnish linguists that the rising use of English is not a threat to the Finnish language.
Let that last part sink in.
English isn’t a threat to Finnish… and yet we’re listening to a couple of jäbät complain about their fears of the threat of English. Maybe Helsingin Sanomat could interview some people about the rising threat of vampires in Helsinki. They could follow it up with an interview with my dog about that loud noise she just heard.
So what is going on? First, the long linguistic answer.
This makes no sense
Two of the people interviewed for the HS story, Lauri Lassila and Touko Kinnunen, say that the current situation in Finnish society is worrying because English loanwords are replacing Finnish words at an increasing pace. The examples that they give are burgeri for purilainen ‘burger’, wingsi for kanansiivet ‘(chicken) wings’, and lunchi for lounas ‘lunch’. Gee, I’ll never guess what they were doing during the interview.
Ok, Finnish does get burgeri from English burger, but it isn’t an English word. The word comes from Hamburger, which is a German word. But that’s not all. The puri– part of purilainen isn’t Finnish. It was borrowed from Swedish, another Germanic language like English and German. And in a something that I know you didn’t see coming if you know any Finnish, the –lainen part of purilainen isn’t Finnish either. It comes from a word that was also borrowed from Swedish. So much for replacing Finnish words with English words. Looks to me like we’re replacing Swedish words with German ones.
And not for nothing, burgeri didn’t recently enter Finnish. The Finnish Etymological Dictionary (Suomen etymologinen sanakirja) dates burgeri back to 1970. Fifty-four years ago! Talk about not being part of the current situation (“nykyinen tilanne”). There’s a simple reason that burgeri is used in Finland instead of purilainen though. Because absolutely no one is going to pay 15€ or more for a purilainen. A burgeri, on the other hand, well, that’ll be 15€ without sides.
As for wingsi replacing kanansiivet, the latter is a straight word-for-word translation: kana “chicken” + siivet “wings”. But please nobody tell these guys that Finnish borrowed the word kana from German. It will crush them.
The suggestion that lunchi is replacing lounas is honestly shocking. No one says lunchi. I’ve asked colleagues and students and they all laughed. What’s weirder though is that Finnish has two common loanwords from English for meals: breku (breakfast) and dinneri (dinner). I don’t know why these guys didn’t give those as examples.
So why is it ok for Finnish to borrow puri and lainen but it’s not ok to borrow burger? The answer gets to the second part of why these guys are wrong about almost everything they say. It’s called the Recency Illusion.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one
Below is a list of incredibly boring Finnish words that are not originally Finnish.
- lääke “medicine” (a Germanic word)
- lasi “glass” (Germanic)
- paperi “paper” (Greek)
- kello “clock” (Germanic)
- tuoli “chair” (Germanic, cognate with English stool)
- lukko “lock” (Germanic)
- roskat “trash” (probably from Old Swedish)
- keskiviikko “Wednesday” (a calque from German; the other days of the week are also loans)
You don’t hear anyone complaining about these words or coming up with Finnish equivalents for them. The main reason for this is that these words are firmly established and there may have never been a Finnish equivalent for them. Another reason is that people like Lassila and Kinnunen take them for granted. They have been using these words since they learned how to talk and well before they learned any other language(s). These loans go unnoticed.
So where do we draw the line? Do we stop using words that have entered Finnish in the last year? In the last 10 years? How about we draw the line at the year 2000? 1950? Or how about 1917, the year Finland declared independence? Burgeri entered Finland before the current Prime Minister did. You can see that whichever date we pick is arbitrary.
How about we just decide that Lassila and his friends are suffering from the Recency Illusion? This is “the (often inaccurate) belief that a usage you have recently noticed is in fact a recent development in the language”. These guys have noticed some English words entering Finnish and they think that they are all recent additions. Instead, Finnish has been borrowing words since forever. Because that’s what languages do. (Funnily enough, there’s actually research on the Recency Illusion in Finland.) Neither the interviewees nor the journalist mention any sources at all, let alone reputable ones. If that’s how it’s going to be, I’d honestly rather read about the threat of vampires, which is just about equal to the threat of English on Finnish, but objectively way cooler.
Some words will be accepted only after they have become established by virtue of being used across generations. Other loanwords may coexist with a Finnish word. For example, the interviewees complain about steppi replacing askel, but they miss the fact that steppi does not cover all the meanings of askel (or all of the compounds with askel) and it certainly doesn’t come with all of the meanings of step in English (Merriam-Webster lists 11 senses of the noun step). It is possible that both words stick around and they develop similar but distinct meanings in Finnish. This has literally happened a bajillion times already in languages in Europe.
Or then maybe the loanword pushes out the Finnish word. And if it does… so what? Are we really losing something if people say burgeri instead of purilainen when both of them are loanwords? English has lost the 2nd-person singular pronoun thou in all but a few phrases used in churches and weddings. Do you care? English used to have the verb lake meaning “to play”. That word looks an awful lot like Finnish leikki(ä) because they come from the same place. Do you miss not being able to say laking?
The really bad stuff
The article makes a passing nod at language change being inevitable (“väistämättä”), but then it gives this dangerous line:
He uskovat, että suomen kieli kuolee lähivuosisatoina kokonaan pois.
(They believe that the Finnish language will completely die out within the next few centuries.)
This is ridiculous. What are they basing this on? There are several endangered languages in Finland but guess what? Finnish isn’t one of them. The Finnish language is on lists of least endangered languages. Finnish is incredibly safe as a language. The guys profiled in this article should be pissed that the paper printed this quote.
Think about what this quote does though. Think about the metaphor it is presenting: DEATH. This is a direct call to make people think that the Finnish language is in danger. It’s not, of course, but the subject of this article believe it is. This group of people – who have been shown to not know what they’re talking about when it comes to language – really, truly believe that Finnish is going to die out.
I would make a joke here, but this line is dangerous because it is not a far jump to go from saying “The Finnish language is in danger from an invading language” to “Finland is in danger from invading foreigners”. And trust me, people will easily make this jump. So remember: they are wrong about this. Finnish is not in danger. Again, there is research from Finnish scholars showing that the rising use of English is not a threat to the Finnish language.
That’s not the only bad belief they have about language. Towards the end of the article, we get this gem:
Jos puhuu vain vähän suomea ja vähän englantia, se voi vaikeuttaa hienovaraista ja käsitteellistä ajattelua, Lassila pohtii.
(If someone speaks only a little Finnish and a little English, it can have an effect on tactful and conceptual thinking, Lassila reasons.
Sanasto vaikuttaa ajatteluun. Sanat ovat ajattelun välineitä. Minun dystopiani on se, että kasvaa lapsia, jotka eivät puhu yhtäkään kieltä hyvin.
(“Vocabulary affects thinking. Words are tools for thinking. My dystopia is a place where children grow up not speaking a single language well.”)
Lassila vertaa heidän projektiaan 70-luvun luonnonsuojelijoihin.
”Aluksi heitä pidettiin hippeinä ja friikkeinä, mutta nykyisin luonnonsuojelu on ihan normaalia.”
(Lassila compares their project to the conservationists of the 1970s.
“At first they were considered hippies and freaks, but nowadays wildlife conservation is just normal.”)
Lassila believes that there is one way to speak a language well. And guess what – it just so happens to be the way that he speaks Finnish (what. a. coincidence.). But you see this pop up all the time in these arguments. It’s the One True Way fallacy in linguistics: the notion that there is one variety of a language which is correct/ideal/good, and that the other varieties are bad/corrupt/broken. It’s not true. Language doesn’t work that way. Context matters very, very much. Linguists talk about words and grammar being appropriate, rather than right or wrong. People sometimes learn appropriate ways to speak by just moving through the world – they learn how to speak by being in situations and seeing how other people speak in those situations. But people are also sometimes explicitly taught what is appropriate. When we show up at school, we are introduced to the standardized variety of the language through the teaching. This may be closer to or farther away from the variety we use at home. It really depends. But the standardized variety is just one variety, appropriate in some situations (at school, in court, at work, etc.) but less appropriate in others (at the bar, in song lyrics, at a sporting event, etc.). Lassila is making the mistake of thinking that speaking Finnish well means speaking it without using English loanwords all the time. He is saying that this is the correct way to speak Finnish. But that just isn’t true.
For what it’s worth, the first two sentences of that quote are also false. There is scant evidence that our language affects our thoughts. There’s a lot of people out there saying it – believing it – but this idea hasn’t stood up to scientific scrutiny. Lassila would know this if he consulted linguistic resources, references or research.
There is a dangerous side to these quotes as well. The subjects of the article compare themselves to (ecological) conservationists. They are PROTECTING the Finnish language in the way that environmentalists protect our planet. If they don’t protect the language, it will DIE from too many loanwords and our children will live in a DYSTOPIA. [insert severe eye roll]
Here’s the thing: the planet needs environmentalists about as much as the Finnish language needs protection from loanwords, which is to say not at all. The planet will be here long after we’re gone no matter what we do. The Finnish language will go on as long as people keep speaking it – in whatever form. If people loan a bunch of words from English or Swedish or Russian or Farsi, so what. As long as there are people to speak the language, it will survive. That’s all it takes. It doesn’t need to be protected from change. It needs to be used. And it if a language is used, it will change no matter what some people think about it.
Ääneni on passini. Tarkista minut. Or language and identity
Another thing that is definitely going on here is that these guys and their friends are negotiating their identities. Language is an inextricable part of who we are and so if these guys are struggling to recall Finnish words, they may be linking that to their identity as a Finn. But this is a personal problem that they are dealing with as if it was a societal problem. And although the languages that you speak are a part of your identity, they are also just a part.
And it might just be a phase for these guys. At this point in their lives, they may be surrounded by English. The movies and TV shows they watch, the music they listen to, the video games they play, the internet sites they visit – all of these may be in English. For now.
I’m sure there are things that you said when you were 15 or 20 or 25 that you do not say now. Your music choices may not have changed (much), but you probably visit different websites. If you have kids, then your reading and viewing habits might be determined by them. You used to read books in English and watch movies in English. Now you read Tatu ja Patu and watch Pikku Kakkonen. That’s the way it goes. You read and watch the news more in Finnish than you used to. Because you’re old and the Finnish news comes on TV at a time when you can watch it. And you’re too tired to change the channel. You should really go to bed.
Because you can’t go to the bar and order an olut, siideri, viini, vodka, viski, or viina without using a loanword (that is, a beer/ale, cider, wine, vodka, whiskey, and booze). So enjoy your kalja (sorry, but sahti and tuoppi are also loans).
Do better, Helsingin Sanomat
A final note to journalists and editors: please talk to linguists about this. It’s literally our job to study this stuff. And yeah, sometimes we will point out that what these jamokes think is actually a big pile of nothing. Sorry, you won’t get the rage clicks that way. But it will be the truth and it will be backed up by research. If you talk to twenty-somethings who are trying to figure themselves out and are blaming language for their problems and you don’t fact check them, well… then you’re going to look bad.
Talk to language professionals. Your readers will appreciate it.