What the heck is Finland?
A question we've all wrestled with
How do I begin an exploration of present-day Finland? I got it: let’s start with a 25,000-year-old object that wasn’t found anywhere near Finland.
You probably learned about these objects in middle or high school. If you’re anything like me, your recollection goes something like this: Venus Figurines are “… uh… some old thing… that um… fertility… I guess?” That fuzzy recollection may be about as close to the truth as one can hope for. Some interpret them as idols of fertility goddesses while others hypothesize that they’re self-portraits. This article won’t solve that debate, nor will any other articles. I bring this object up because it’s old. Super old! When my ninth-grade friends and I snickered at pictures of boobs in the textbook, we may not have fully appreciated the historical, cultural, and demographic significance.
The pictured object dates back to around 24,000 to 22,000 BC. Archeologists have found 200 others, dating from 30,000 to 10,000 BC. The one above was discovered in Austria, though they’ve been found throughout the European continent. I’m guessing that many of my readers have European ancestry. Even if you don’t, your culture has probably been heavily impacted by those who do. Think about your culture, your language, your religion, and even your genes. All of that has… almost nothing to do with the people who produced Venus Figurines.
The next section will explain why.
Three Stages of Europe
We all understand what has occurred in the Western Hemisphere’s demographic shift in the last five centuries. Due to a combination of diseases and colonial aggression, Europeans replaced much of the previous population. No, I’m not trying to decolonize Simplify or cancel next year’s Thanksgiving. Instead, I want to highlight something odd about this story. The odd thing is that…. we know it. Even if we disagree about how to engage with our history, almost everyone understands the basics. What other continents can we say this about? What you can tell me about how East and South Asia developed their current demographic mixtures? Do you know where the Australian Aboriginals came from? What about Pacific Islands like Guam and Hawaii? Don’t even get me started with people’s knowledge of Africa. We know about North And South America because that demographic shift occurred within the tiny window of written human history.
If you found an object 700-year artifact in a Polish area of Chicago, you’d understand that that artifact wasn’t created by ethnic Poles. Yet, many of us probably made that same assumption for the Venus Figurine. The thing was in Europe, and there are people in Europe today, so that must have been made by the ancestors of modern Europeans, right? Wrong. It turns out, Europe had its pair of 1492s. The Venus Figures come from the first phase of Europe, and, just like in the Americas, new populations overtook these natives.
Farmers from Anatolia (roughly, Turkey minus Istanbul) migrated into the European continent around 11,500 years ago. By 6,500 years ago, they had replaced most of the older Venus-figurine-making population. This represents phase two. Today, this culture’s most lasting achievement seems to be the mysterious Stonehenge monument in England. Given their geographic and demographic breadth, academics like Colin Renfrew crowned them as the founders of the Indo-European language family.
However, this linguistic theory doesn’t seem to match the data. It can’t explain the spread of words related to wheels and axles, since Anatolian farmers didn’t use them. Nor can explain the presence of so much horse shit (my favorite type of linguistic data) around Europe. Most importantly, the rise of genetic analysis has put the Anatolian farmer theory on life support. The genetics of modern Europeans don’t match them. Instead, it matches a group of animal herders from the Eurasian steppes. That’s phase three.
Modern Europe
I’ve referenced the “Indo-European language family” or “Proto-Indo-European” numerous times on this blog. I imagine that most have picked it up through context clues, but I should clarify what I’m talking about.
Remember that there’s no technical distinction between a language and a dialect. Linguist Max Weinrich once quipped that a language is a “dialect with an army and a navy.” After Yugoslavia split, the single Serbo-Croatian language became two separate languages: Serbian and Croatian. Nothing about the Serbian or Croatian tongues changed, but the new political border created a new linguistic border. Meanwhile, a resident of Riyadh couldn’t communicate with a resident of Cairo in each other’s colloquial tongues, but we refer to both languages as “Arabic.” Yes, there’s a single, standardized written Arabic that’s maintained for religious and political purposes. But why not refer to that as “Arabic” and refer to the colloquial speech as something else? Ultimately, if you want to understand why something is considered a language rather than a dialect, you’ll have to analyze the speaker’s culture, religion, and politics. You won’t figure that out from the speech itself.
Think of it this way: how many people speak Latin today? In one sense, almost no one does. In another sense, billions of people do. If we consider Spanish, French, Romanian, Italian, and Portuguese to be mere dialects of Latin, then it’s the most spoken language in the world. The Germanic languages result from a similar split. Dutch, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic all descend from a common tongue spoken about 3,000 years ago. Unlike Latin, no one ever wrote this language down. As a result, Linguists therefore refer to the theoretical common language as “Proto-Germanic.” They throw the “Proto-” tag in front of the language to indicate that it’s theoretical (like Proto-Germanic) rather than observed historical documents (as with Latin.)
Latin and the Germanic languages also share a common ancestor. We could therefore refer to German, Spanish, English, and Romanian as dialects of “Proto-Italo-Germanic.” We don’t because we can go deeper. Greek, Armenian, Albanian, the Balto-Slavic languages, Persian, and most languages in North Indian languages also descend from a single common language. English, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Persian, and Bengali are all dialects of a language we could call Proto-Germanic-Greek-Italo-Celtic-Armenian-Albanian-Balto-Slavic-Iranian-North-Indian. That’s a bit long, so linguists refer to this language as Proto-Indo-European. All these dialects (or languages, if you prefer) of Proto-Indo-European belong to the “Indo-European Language Family.”
Through their prowess on the domesticated horse, these Proto-Indo-European speakers slowly dominated the populations of Europe, Iran, and North India. Today’s Europeans and Persians obtained most of their DNA from these steppe herders. Meanwhile, modern Indians are a genetic mixture between Indo-Europeans and the pre-historic south-Indian population.
Likewise, the Indo-European Language Family dominates these regions. However, you’ll see a few exceptions. You can hear Turkic languages, like Azerbaijani, in parts of Iran. Most South Indians speak a Dravidian language. The ancestors of these Dravidian speakers are probably the pre-historical south-Indian population mentioned above. Then, we get to Europe. You’ve probably heard about Basque, the mysterious tongue spoken in small parts of Spain and France. I’ll leave that aside for now. The final stragglers are the Uralic languages: namely Hungarian, Estonian, and Finnish. We’ll focus on Finland for now. How did this group of people, sandwiched between two branches of the Indo-European Language family (Germanic and Slavic) end up with a language that comes from neither?
Origin of the Uralic Languages
Let’s start with some background on the Uralic language family. Above, I mentioned that Finland rests between the Nordic and East Slavic speakers. That’s true, but it also rests between a lot of Uralic speakers. Check out this cool picture:
I’m not going to pretend that I’ve digested all the info on that chart. The point is, Finnish isn’t Basque. It’s not some outlier in a sea of Proto-Indo-European. Still, the map doesn’t tell us much about its origins. On it, you’ll notice four epicenters regions of Uralic speakers: Hungary, the Baltic sea, European Russia, and Siberia. Any of these spots could match the birthplace of the language family. Or, none of them could. After all, the languages of Reykjavík and Bangalore both descend from the Russian steppes. Nahuatl, the language of pre-colonial Teotihuacan, comes from New Mexico.
Asking “Where did the Uralic languages come from?” might sound like asking “How long is a yardstick?” The name implies an origin in the Ural mountains, a range in present-day Russia:
…but what if I told you it descends from a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean? Kidding, it doesn’t. It comes from the Ural Mountains, though researchers debate the precise location. Traditional scholarship places its origin in the forest-y Northwest of European Russia. Evidence for this homeland included the vocabulary of early Uralic languages, which indicates a lack of agriculture or animal husbandry. The Northwest hypothesis also fits with a linguistic version of Occam’s Razor: the criterion of greatest diversity. According to this idea, we place the homeland at the spot that separates the earliest diverging branches of the language. Unfortunately, this requires a comprehensive knowledge of how the early Uralic languages split up. No one agrees on that, so the principle amounts to stacking assumptions on assumptions. Some scholars also believe that all branches of the Uralic languages diverged at the same time. If that’s the case, the criterion of greatest diversity has nothing to say. Finally, proponents of the European Russia Origin point to borrowed words from early Proto-Indo-European. It’s not clear, though, that we see more commonalities between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European than one would expect from random chance.
Later evidence hints at a Siberian origin, east of the Urals. We can start with genetics. Recall, from earlier, that most of Europe experienced three phases of demography. First were the Venus-figurine people, then the Stonehenge people, then the horse-riding Indo-Europeans, with the last group constituting the bulk of European genes today. The same holds for the Uralic speakers. Speakers of these languages share more genetic ancestry with their neighbors than with each other. Finns are, in other words, white guys. However, these Uralic speakers do share a fourth, unique source of genetic ancestry, and that ancestry matches people of Siberian origin. According to complicated models that I won’t pretend to understand, genetic similarity correlates with linguistic similarity among the Uralic tongues. Hence, the genetics points toward an eastern origin.
Other evidence backs the Siberian theory. First, the Western origin theory implies an eastern migration of the Samoyed branch, our yellow-and-tan friends from the colorful map above. This theory of migration clashes with the geography of the region. The Samoyed branch also maintains more of Proto-Uralic’s grammatical complexity than other branches do. Since linguistic spread seems to simplify languages (due to an increase in second-language speakers), this provides some evidence that the eastern Uralic-speakers migrated less than anyone else. Uralic languages also share some grammatical features with the tongues of North Asia. Finally, the geographic vocabulary of Proto-Uralic seems to reflect the Siberian taiga.
Why Finland?
In short, the Uralic language family probably originated east of the Ural mountains. My most perceptive readers probably notice that Finland is not east of the Ural mountains. How did the Finnish language make it Finland? Opinions fit into two broad camps: migration theory and continuity theory.
First, some background. Following the late ice age around 20,000 years ago, rapid climate change allowed Europeans to move north. Over the next 10,000-15,000 years, various Late Palaeolithic and Early Mesolithic cultures emerged in these newly inhabited lands. Linguists refer to their languages as Paleo-European. Some scholars suggest that some of the Paleo-European languages were Uralic, but this doesn’t mesh with the Eastern Homeland theory discussed in the previous section.
The migration and continuity theories differ in how they explain the separation between the Finnic (the ancestors of modern Finns and Estonians) and the Saami (the purple people on the aforementioned map). According to the migration theory, Finno-Ugrian (i.e., all the Uralic speakers except the Samoyed) arrived in Baltic Europe around 3,000 years ago. By this point, the Finnic people had already diverged from the Saami. The Finnic languages themselves diverged over the next two-thousand years, evolving into the now-separate Finnish and Estonian languages.
Later scholarship supports the continuity theory. Under this model, Uralic speakers moved to the Baltics between 6,000 and 11,000 years ago. The theory implies a great deal of contact between Finno-Ugrian and foreign cultures. From 5,300 to 200 BCE, four major waves of cultural influence swept through Finland. These waves can be seen by changes in pottery. None of these four waves seem to have involved the replacement of the native population, as the flint technology remained stagnant. Early Finno-Urgrian had additional contact with Indo-European-speaking cultures, such as the Battle Axe Cultures and the Abashevo Culture, around 4,000-5,000 years ago. The continuity theory holds that the Indo-European speakers assimilated into the Finno-Urgrian culture. The Indo-Europeans adopted the language, while the Finno-Urgrians adopted the animal husbandry practices. The adoption of Indo-European cultural practices created a cultural split within Finland, which led to the separation of the Finnic and Saami branches.
Scholars continue to debate these two models. Migration theory proponents poke holes in the continuity hypothesis via place names, pottery, Indo-European cognates, and the similarity between modern Finnish and Estonian. Continuity proponents have responded by adjusting the Finnish homeland. Some argue that the Finns moved in from Estonia. Others argue that they occupied only a small, southwestern proportion of the country until around 1,300 years ago and the Finnish domination of Finland is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The debates continue, and I don’t care to recount back-and-forth reinterpretation of pre-historic pottery. If anything, my research on this topic has made me consider some post-modernist conclusions. When it comes to the Uralic language family, what might be presented as FACT often amounts to some guy’s interpretation of esoteric evidence. Regardless, we can see why Finland speaks Finnish. The Finnish separation from the Uralic languages occurred after the bulk of the Indo-European conquests of Europe. When these Uralic speakers did encounter Indo-Europeans, the latter assimilated into the former’s culture.
Proto-Indo-Euro…Uralic?
We’ve discussed two language families, both with Western migrations into Europe, and both with a ton of similar vocabulary. That leads to an inevitable question: could both have derived from super-duper-ancient language? We must tread lightly with vocabulary comparison, however. Eager scholars can always find minute and flimsy connections between distant tongues. Languages contain tens of thousands of words, but we can’t make tens of thousands of sounds with our mouths. You’ll inevitably find cognates through the power of random chance. Korean features a word with a similar pronunciation and meaning as the English word “many.” Yet, even the Ancient Aliens guy would scoff at the idea of a Proto-Koreanic-Germanic. There’s another, more important issue, with the shared word between the Uralic and Indo-Europeans. Much of the seemingly shared vocabulary isn’t flimsy. It’s quite close. It’s too close.
Imagine an alien linguist who knows everything about the Indo-European-Language family, but not much about the day-to-day life of actual humans. He stumbles his way into Germany and hears a man say Ich trinke gern den Kaffee. That last noun, Kaffee, intrigues him. He recognizes the accent and knows that this speaker’s dialect underwent the High German Consonant Shift. This consonant shift, among other changes, converted p into f. This linguist takes a trip to England, where this consonant shift did not occur. That’s why they say sleep in England and schlafen in Germany. He also knows that English tends to drop those trailing vowel sounds, so he expects a pronunciation like “cop.” To his shock, he hears “coffee,” not much different than what he heard on the mainland.
Weird, but, it’s just one word in one language. This linguist also knows about Grimm’s Law. This consonant shift implies that, if he visits Italic-speaking people, they would refer to this beverage as something like “goppee.” He heads to Italy and hears caffe. Maybe a one-off mistake? Then he hears cafe in Spanish and cafea in Romania. Now, he’s even more confused. Finally, he takes one last trip to India. Given the thousands of years of separation, their words must sound completely different. He meets a Hindi speaker, and they refer to the caffeinated drink with a word that doesn’t sound much different than the German one. What’s going on here?
You probably know the answer to this one. Kaffee, coffee, cafe, and कॉफी aren’t cognates. Each of these languages borrowed the word from Arabic. Since it arrived in each so recently, it never had the chance to participate in the sound changes from thousands of years ago. If the word entered the Indo-European language family in pre-historical times, Hindi, Spanish, and English speakers would pronounce it much differently today. Since it arrived merely 400-500 years ago, the term hasn’t had much time to diverge.
Unfortunately, I can’t provide any cute stories relating Indo-European words to their Uralic counterparts. Still, the jargon-y literature shows you how sound changes point us toward recent loaning rather than an ancient Proto-Indo-Euro-Uralic
Yet even these loanwords were borrowed before the Late Proto-Finnic stage, whose *tti would have been substituted for *tj and whose *ti should have remained as such, as shown by the following examples:
● North Germanic *fl atja- (> Old Norse fl et) ‘fl oor’ → Late Proto-Finnic *lattia > Finnish lattia ‘fl oor’ (LägLoS 1996: 176).
● North Germanic *harðjōʀ (> Old Norse herðar) ‘shoulders’ → Late ProtoFinnic *hartia > Finnish hartia ‘shoulder’ (LägLoS 1991: 84).
In brief, if these words had been borrowed into Middle Proto-Finnic, their modern Finnish shapes should not be lattia and hartia but *latsa and *kartsa, respectively. Even though they must therefore have been borrowed into Late Proto-Finnic, they show no i/j-umlaut dating from the mid-first millennium AD onwards (see Schulte 1998 on runic evidence). All this agrees with what was said before that Late Proto-Finnic dates to the Early Runic period (ca. 200–500 AD).
Executive Summary
I’m a suave business professional, so let’s summarize this with some bullet points.
Around 11,500 years ago, Anatolian farmers (aka Stonehenge people) replaced the native-ish people of Europe (aka Venus Figurine people).
Steppe animal herders replaced this new population around 6,000 years ago
We refer to the language of the steppe herders as Proto-Indo-European, and the modern descendants of these languages as the Indo-European Language Family.
This language family dominates Europe, Iran, and India
Exceptions to this dominance include the Dravidian languages in South India, Turkic languages in Iran, and the Uralic languages in Europe
The Uralic languages spread from Siberia, with the modern Samoyed branch staying closest to the original homeland
Scholars disagree on how Finland’s modern languages, Finnish and the Sami languages, migrated into Finland
Some propose the migration theory. This postulates that the Finish and Sami separated in Western Russia, and they migrated into Finland as distinct cultures
The continuity theory argues that Finish and Sami separated after migrating to Finland
When early Indo-Europeans migrated to Finland, they adopted the Uralic Languages
Common words between Uralic and Indo-European languages don’t reflect ancient sound changes. Thus, these commonalties imply loaning, rather than the existence of Proto-Indo-Euro-Uralic.
I really like reading technical arguments on topics I know virtually nothing about. Thanks :)