102-586: The Finns Party , ( Finnish : Perussuomalaiset , PS ; Swedish : Sannfinländarna , Sannf ) formerly known as the True Finns , is a right-wing populist political party in Finland . It was founded in 1995 following the dissolution of the Finnish Rural Party . The party achieved its electoral breakthrough in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary election , when it won 19.1% of votes, becoming
204-598: A coalition government with the winning National Coalition Party , the Christian Democrats and Swedish People's Party of Finland . The party currently holds seven ministerial portfolios in the Orpo Cabinet . The predecessor of the Finns Party was the Finnish Rural Party (SMP), founded by Agrarian League dissident Veikko Vennamo in 1959. Vennamo ran into serious disagreement with Arvo Korsimo,
306-819: A "j", e.g. vesj [vesʲ] "water", cf. standard vesi [vesi] . The first known written account in Helsinki slang is from the 1890 short story Hellaassa by young Santeri Ivalo (words that do not exist in, or deviate from, the standard spoken Finnish of its time are in bold): Kun minä eilen illalla palasin labbiksesta , tapasin Aasiksen kohdalla Supiksen , ja niin me laskeusimme tänne Espikselle , jossa oli mahoton hyvä piikis . Mutta me mentiin Studikselle suoraan Hudista tapaamaan, ja jäimme sinne pariksi tunniksi, kunnes ajoimme Kaisikseen . There are two main registers of Finnish used throughout
408-669: A "non-socialist workers' party". The party's programme on rural policy also called for state support for rural regions, particularly agriculture, suggesting state subsidies to relieve the effect of structural changes on the rural areas. This policy is shared by the Centre Party in Finland and originates from the agrarian and rural policies of both parties. The Finns Party favours increasing state investments in infrastructure and industry as well. A tendency towards favouring old industrial policies have led some political analysts to label
510-473: A considerable influence upon the spoken word, because illiteracy is nonexistent and many Finns are avid readers. In fact, it is still not entirely uncommon to meet people who "talk book-ish" ( puhuvat kirjakieltä ); it may have connotations of pedantry, exaggeration, moderation, weaseling or sarcasm (somewhat like heavy use of Latinate words in English, or more old-fashioned or "pedantic" constructions: compare
612-503: A former long-distance running Olympic champion, and Anni Sinnemäki , the songwriter of pop music group Ultra Bra . Some of these celebrities got elected. After the elections, Prime Minister Lipponen formed a new government of the same five parties. Only one of those parties left the government during the parliamentary term 1999-2003: the Greens moved into the opposition in May 2002, when
714-405: A language of administration, journalism, literature, and science in Finland, along with Swedish. In 1853 Daniel Europaeus published the first Swedish-Finnish dictionary, and between 1866 and 1880 Elias Lönnrot compiled the first Finnish-Swedish dictionary. In the same period, Antero Warelius conducted ethnographic research and, among other topics, he documented the geographic distribution of
816-490: A modern society." The Finns Party is opposed to the integration of the European Union and to Finnish Eurozone membership. The party also calls for reductions in foreign aid. The party believes in national sovereignty : [T]he eternal and unlimited right to always decide freely and independently of all of one's affairs lies only and solely with the people, which forms a nation separate of others. Shortly after
918-475: A more systematic writing system. Along the way, Finnish lost several fricative consonants in a process of sound change . The sounds [ð] and [θ(ː)] disappeared from the language, surviving only in a small rural region in Western Finland. In the standard language, however, the effect of the lost sounds is thus: Modern Finnish punctuation, along with that of Swedish, uses the colon (:) to separate
1020-445: A north–south split as well as an east–west split. The northern dialects of Proto-Finnic, from which Finnish developed, lacked the mid vowel [ ɤ ] . This vowel was found only in the southern dialects, which developed into Estonian , Livonian , and Votian . The northern variants used third person singular pronoun hän instead of southern tämä (Est. tema ). While the eastern dialects of Proto-Finnic (which developed in
1122-511: A parallel currency within Finland to initiate phasing out Finnish membership of the Eurozone . Finnish language Finnish ( endonym : suomi [ˈsuo̯mi] or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li] ) is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish
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#17327657565441224-654: A party leader in August 2021. He was succeeded by MP Riikka Purra on 14 August. Since 2020, further minor splits have emerged within the party, forming the Power Belongs to the People party and Blue-and-Black Movement . During the 2023 Finnish parliamentary election the party finished in second place ahead of the Social Democrats with 20% of the vote and 46 seats, marking the strongest result to date for
1326-576: A range of diphthongs , although vowel harmony limits which diphthongs are possible. Finnish belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family ; as such, it is one of the few European languages that is not Indo-European . The Finnic branch also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in Russia's Republic of Karelia . The closest relative of Finnish
1428-440: A scale where 1 was extreme left and 10 was extreme right, the average supporter placed themselves at 5.4. According to the same study, the supporters were united by patriotism and social conservatism . A 2011 study indicated that the Finns Party was the most popular party among voters with an annual income of 35,000–50,000 euros , while over a quarter of the party's voters earn over 50,000 per year. The same study also indicated that
1530-440: A total amount of Finnish-speakers roughly between 7,200 and 15,600. In the latest census , around 1000 people in Russia claimed to speak Finnish natively; however, a larger amount of 14,000 claimed to be able to speak Finnish in total. There are also forms of Finnish spoken by diasporas outside Europe, such as American Finnish , spoken by Finnish Americans , and Siberian Finnish , spoken by Siberian Finns . Today, Finnish
1632-402: Is Eurosceptic . The party combines right-wing economic policies and economic nationalism with socially conservative values , and ethnic nationalism . Several scholars have described them as radically right-wing populist . In the parliament seating order, the party was seated in the centre of the plenary until 2019 when it was moved to the right of the plenary despite the party's opposition to
1734-508: Is abbreviation of word-final vowels, and in many respects they resemble Estonian. The Tavastian dialects ( hämäläismurteet ) are spoken in Tavastia . They are closest to the standard language, but feature some slight vowel changes, such as the opening of diphthong-final vowels ( tie → tiä , miekka → miakka , kuolisi → kualis ), the change of d to l (mostly obsolete) or trilled r (widespread, nowadays disappearance of d
1836-514: Is either Ingrian , or depending on the definition, Karelian . Finnic languages form a dialect continuum, where for instance Finnish and Estonian are not separated by any single isogloss that would separate dialects considered "Finnish" from those considered "Estonian", despite the two standard languages being not mutually intelligible. Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with other Uralic languages (such as Hungarian and Sami languages ) in several respects including: Several theories exist as to
1938-631: Is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish . In Sweden , both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish ) are official minority languages . Kven , which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by a minority of Finnish descent. Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation . Nouns , adjectives , pronouns , numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in
2040-601: Is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish), and has been an official language of the European Union since 1995. However, the Finnish language did not have an official status in the country during the period of Swedish rule , which ended in 1809. After the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Finland , and against the backdrop of the Fennoman movement , the language obtained its official status in
2142-746: Is popular) and the personal pronouns ( me: meitin ('we: our'), te: teitin ('you: your') and he: heitin ('they: their')). The South Ostrobothnian dialects ( eteläpohjalaismurteet ) are spoken in Southern Ostrobothnia . Their most notable feature is the pronunciation of "d" as a tapped or even fully trilled /r/ . The Central and North Ostrobothnian dialects ( keski- ja pohjoispohjalaismurteet ) are spoken in Central and Northern Ostrobothnia . The Lapland dialects ( lappilaismurteet ) are spoken in Lapland . The dialects spoken in
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#17327657565442244-541: The 2007 , the party gained two further seats for a total of five. In the 2008 municipal election , the Finns Party were most successful in those districts where the Social Democrats and the Left Alliance lost most. In the 2011 election , the Centre Party suffered the largest blow from the Finns Party's success. According to a 2008–2009 study, Finns Party supporters viewed themselves as centrist : on
2346-474: The 2014 European Parliament election and increased its number of MEPs to two. In the 2015 election , the Finns Party got 17.7% of the votes and 38 seats. This meant that they were the third largest party by votes but the second largest party by seats. The Finns Party subsequently entered into a coalition government with the Centre Party and the NCP, led by Prime Minister Juha Sipilä . The party's participation in
2448-594: The 2018 presidential election . In the election, Huhtasaari placed third with 6.9 percent of the votes, while the incumbent president Sauli Niinistö went on to secure his second term with a majority of votes. At the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election , the Finns Party finished in second place and increased its number of MPs to 39 (with its strongest result being in Satakunta ) while the breakaway Blue Reform party lost all of its seats. On 21 June 2021, Jussi Halla-aho announced that he would retire from his position as
2550-547: The Eurozone . In its latest platform, the Finns Party states that it supports a "European policy" based on appreciation for Western and Christian shaped values. The party argues that Finland is needed in the European Parliament to defend Finnish interests in the short-term, but states the "long-term strategic goal" is to take gradual steps to withdraw Finland from the European Union and proposes introducing
2652-668: The Finnish Diet of 1863. Finnish also enjoys the status of an official minority language in Sweden . Under the Nordic Language Convention , citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Finnish have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs. However, concerns have been expressed about
2754-581: The Paris Agreement , signed in December 2015, saying it was "catastrophic" for the economy, and demanded that the private sector and taxpayers be spared its "disastrous economic consequences". The Finns Party rejects the existence of nonbinary genders , and opposes same-sex marriage , same-sex adoption and in vitro fertilisation given to same-sex couples and single women. The party supports teaching "healthy national pride" in schools, because
2856-738: The Sipilä Cabinet marked a softening of its Eurosceptic positions. On 22 June 2016, Finns Party MP Maria Tolppanen joined the Social Democrats, after which the Finns Party had 37 seats in the parliament. In March 2017, Soini announced that he would step down as party chair in the next party congress in June. In June 2017, Jussi Halla-aho and Sampo Terho faced off in the leadership election , in which Halla-aho received 949 votes against Terho's 646 votes and thus succeeded Soini as party chair. Sipilä and Minister of Finance Petteri Orpo soon announced that they would not continue their coalition with
2958-499: The sentence . Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows them to be ordered differently. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information structure . Finnish orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, and is phonemic to a great extent. Vowel length and consonant length are distinguished, and there are
3060-513: The stem of a word and its grammatical ending in some cases, for example after acronyms , as in EU:ssa 'in the EU'. (This contrasts with some other alphabetic writing systems, which would use other symbols, such as e.g. apostrophe, hyphen.) Since suffixes play a prominent role in the language, this use of the colon is quite common. In the 19th century Johan Vilhelm Snellman and others began to stress
3162-479: The 2011 election: in one opinion poll from June 2011 gave the party a record popularity of 23 percent. The party's membership rose to over 8,000 members by 2013 (up from circa 5,500 in 2011 and circa 1,000 in 2005). Membership in the party's youth organisation rose as well, going from 800 before the 2011 election to over 2,200 in 2013. The party nominated Soini as its candidate for the 2012 presidential election; Soini finished fourth with 9.4 percent. Soini interpreted
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3264-632: The Agrarian League's party secretary , and was excluded from the parliamentary group . As a result, Vennamo immediately started building his own organization and founded the Finnish Rural Party. Vennamo was a populist and became a critic of President Urho Kekkonen and of political corruption within the "old parties", particularly the Centre Party (the renamed Agrarian League). The Rural Party achieved two major victories in
3366-647: The European Parliament in 2009, it became a founding member of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group (EFD) in the Parliament. After the 2014 election, the party chose to leave the EFD to join the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR). Commenting on the party's choice of group, party secretary Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo said in 2014 that joining a right-wing parliamentary group would not change
3468-458: The Finnish dialects. The most important contributions to improving the status of Finnish were made by Elias Lönnrot . His impact on the development of modern vocabulary in Finnish was particularly significant. In addition to compiling the Kalevala , he acted as an arbiter in disputes about the development of standard Finnish between the proponents of western and eastern dialects, ensuring that
3570-431: The Finnish economy enough, and of not slowing down sufficiently the large internal migration of Finns from the rural towns and small cities to the large economic growth centres, like the Helsinki and Tampere regions. Several parties hired as their candidates previously non-political or only locally politically active celebrities, such as Leena Harkimo , the manager of Helsinki's ice hockey team Jokerit , Lasse Virén ,
3672-484: The Finnish parliament in the 2011 election. Soini was the party's presidential candidate for a second time in the election of 2012 . Jussi Halla-aho succeeded Soini as party chair in 2017. The Finns Party obtained 39 seats in the 2011 election, making them the third largest party, narrowly behind the National Coalition Party (44) and the Social Democrats (42). Soini received 43,212 personal votes,
3774-549: The Finns Party as a centre-left party. The Finns Party aspires to energy self-reliance and supports nuclear energy . The party calls for a pro-industry environmental policy, opposing green tax reform and taxpayers' involvement in emission trading funds. The party strongly supports the peat industry, which produces massive amounts of greenhouse gases , having even proposed exempting this production from any tax. The party generally scores best in municipalities whose economies are tied to this industry. The party has strongly denounced
3876-412: The Finns Party if it was led by Halla-aho. Subsequently, twenty Finns Party MPs, including Soini and Terho, defected to form a new parliamentary group under the name New Alternative, later renamed to Blue Reform and after that, in 2022, into Finnish Reform Movement . As all cabinet ministers were among the defectors, the then Blue Reform made an agreement with Sipilä to stay in the government. Following
3978-402: The Finns Party vehemently opposed during the electoral campaign, the party voluntarily broke from the negotiations to become the leading opposition party. Soini said that the party would not compromise its core principles just to enter the government. According to an opinion poll, most of the party's supporters accepted this decision. The Finns Party's popularity initially continued to rise after
4080-462: The Finns Party's 70-page programme for the 2011 election, Mikko Lahtinen, political scientist in the University of Tampere , and Markku Hyrkkänen, historian of ideas in the University of Turku , note that nationalism is a theme consistently repeated throughout the programme. According to them, the party presents populism as a noble ideology, which seeks to empower the people. Lahtinen describes
4182-451: The Finns combine elements of both right-wing and left-wing politics along with populist rhetoric. In the party's 2011 programme, the Finns Party advocated a more progressive taxation system and support for the welfare state. The party opposed the establishment of a flat tax and called for the raising of the capital gains tax and the re-institution of the wealth tax . According to the party,
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4284-694: The United States. The majority of the population of Finland (90.37% as of 2010 ) speak Finnish as their first language . The remainder speak Swedish (5.42%), one of the Sámi languages (for example Northern , Inari , or Skolt ), or another language as their first language. Finnish is spoken as a second language in Estonia by about 167,000 people. The Finnic varities found in Norway's Finnmark (namely Kven ) and in northern Sweden (namely Meänkieli ) have
4386-502: The ability to appeal to common people and make complicated things look easy. The election result was also referred to as "shocking" and "exceptional". After the election, the National Coalition Party (NCP) began negotiations aiming to form a cabinet between the NCP, the Social Democrats, and the Finns Party. However, when it became clear that the NCP and the Social Democrats would continue to support EU bailouts, which
4488-529: The border created between Sweden and Finland in 1809 when Russia annexed Finland. This caused the speakers of Meänkieli to be isolated from the developments of standard Finnish and instead be influenced by the Swedish language. However, it is still mutually integible with Finnish, and is thus sometimes considered a dialect of the Finnish language. The Kven language is spoken in Finnmark and Troms , in Norway. Its speakers are descendants of Finnish emigrants to
4590-514: The colloquial language) ei kö teillä ole e(i) ks teil(lä) oo "don't you (pl.) have (it)?" (compare eiks to standard Estonian confirmatory interrogative eks ) 1999 Finnish parliamentary election Paavo Lipponen SDP Paavo Lipponen SDP Parliamentary elections were held in Finland on 21 March 1999. Despite suffering significant losses, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) remained
4692-404: The country. One is the "standard language" ( yleiskieli ), and the other is the " spoken language " ( puhekieli ). The standard language is used in formal situations like political speeches and newscasts. Its written form, the "book language" ( kirjakieli ), is used in nearly all written texts, not always excluding even the dialogue of common people in popular prose. The spoken language, on
4794-478: The difference between saying "There's no children I'll leave it to" and "There are no children to whom I shall leave it"). More common is the intrusion of typically literary constructions into a colloquial discourse, as a kind of quote from written Finnish. It is quite common to hear book-like and polished speech on radio or TV, and the constant exposure to such language tends to lead to the adoption of such constructions even in everyday language. A prominent example of
4896-428: The eastern part of the country). Allowance regarding the use of the Swedish language and its teaching will have to be made for those communes where Swedish-speaking populations are in the majority or a large percentage of the population – Swedish is one of Finland's national languages. The cultural program of the Finns Party, which proposed subsidizing traditional art over postmodern art , prompted criticism from outside
4998-471: The economic situation); and granting the Finnish nationality after five years of residence in Finland, provided the immigrant masters Finnish, has no criminal record, and has means of subsistence. The party also requires that immigrants accept Finnish sociocultural norms . The only written declaration to the European Parliament made by a True Finns' MEP also concerns immigration matters. The party underlines
5100-445: The effect of the standard language is the development of the consonant gradation form /ts : ts/ as in metsä : metsän , as this pattern was originally (1940) found natively only in the dialects of the southern Karelian isthmus and Ingria . It has been reinforced by the spelling "ts" for the dental fricative [θː] , used earlier in some western dialects. The spelling and the pronunciation this encourages however approximate
5202-496: The elections of 1970 and 1983 , winning 18 and 17 seats, respectively. In the 1970s, Vennamo's personalized leadership style alienated some in the party, which led to a split in the parliamentary group in 1972. After the Rural Party's new rise in 1983 under Vennamo's son Pekka, the party became a partner in two coalition governments . However, the party's support declined steadily in the late-1980s and early-1990s. In 1995 ,
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#17327657565445304-551: The formal. However, in signalling the former in writing, syncope and sandhi – especially internal – may occasionally amongst other characteristics be transcribed, e.g. menenpä → me(n)empä . This never occurs in the standard variety. he mene vät ne mene e "they go" loss of a number contrast on verbs in the 3rd person ( menee is 3rd person singular in the formal language) ( minä) o le n mä o o n "I am" or "I will be" and no pro-drop (i.e., personal pronouns are usually mandatory in
5406-446: The future status of Finnish in Sweden, for example, where reports produced for the Swedish government during 2017 show that minority language policies are not being respected, particularly for the 7% of Finns settled in the country. The Uralic family of languages, of which Finnish is a member, are hypothesized to derive from a single ancestor language termed Proto-Uralic , spoken sometime between 8,000 and 2,000 BCE (estimates vary) in
5508-703: The geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages. The most widely held view is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga . The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar. Despite having overlapping geographical distributions, Finnic languages and Sami languages are not closely related, and
5610-401: The government. They called for labour reform, which they claimed would make it easier for employers to hire new employees and for small enterprises to operate. Finland's largest labour unions rejected the proposed work reform, claiming that it would reduce the employees' job security and would excessively increase the employers' power. The Centrists also accused the government of not improving
5712-461: The grammatical and phonological changes also include the most common pronouns and suffixes, which amount to frequent but modest differences. Some sound changes have been left out of the formal language. For example, irregular verbs have developed in the spoken language as a result of the elision of sonorants in some verbs of the Type III class (with subsequent vowel assimilation ), but only when
5814-645: The highest number of all candidates, leaving behind the Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb and the Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen in their Uusimaa electoral district. The popularity of the party rose from 4.1% to 19.1% in just four years. Helsingin Sanomat wrote in an editorial that the party and Soini had "rewritten the electoral history books". According to political analyst Jan Sundberg , Soini had
5916-520: The hypothesis of a separate taxonomic " Finno-Samic " node is controversial. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , United States, classifies Finnish as a level III language (of four levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers. Finnish is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland. There are also notable Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Canada, and
6018-470: The language, which he based on Swedish, German, and Latin. The Finnish standard language still relies on his innovations with regard to spelling, though Agricola used less systematic spelling than is used today. Though Agricola's intention was that each phoneme (and allophone under qualitative consonant gradation ) should correspond to one letter, he failed to achieve this goal in various respects. For example, k , c , and q were all used for
6120-604: The largest party of the Eduskunta and Paavo Lipponen remained Prime Minister. Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen's five-party "rainbow government" consisting of the SDP, National Coalition Party , Left Alliance , Swedish People's Party and the Green League had been in power since April 1995. It had managed to keep Finland's economy growing, to reduce the state's budget deficit and to create jobs, although it had failed to halve
6222-536: The leadership election of Jussi Halla-aho , the party hardened its position towards the European Union. In 2017, Laura Huhtasaari stated that she would support leaving the EU should she win the 2018 Finnish presidential election citing the growth of the Union's power at the expense of the member states. Other party members have supported the idea of Finland withdrawing from both the Schengen Agreement and
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#17327657565446324-407: The left-wing brand to the Finns Party. During the electoral campaign in 2011 Soini stated that he preferred the Social Democrats over the centre-right National Coalition Party as a possible coalition partner in a future cabinet. Soini has stated that the Finns are a "workers' party without socialism". A researcher for the opinion polling company Taloustutkimus agreed, describing the Finns Party as
6426-415: The main cultural and political centres. The standard language, however, has always been a consciously constructed medium for literature. It preserves grammatical patterns that have mostly vanished from the colloquial varieties and, as its main application is writing, it features complex syntactic patterns that are not easy to handle when used in speech. The colloquial language develops significantly faster, and
6528-411: The modern-day eastern Finnish dialects, Veps, Karelian, and Ingrian) formed genitive plural nouns via plural stems (e.g., eastern Finnish kalojen < * kaloi -ten ), the western dialects of Proto-Finnic (today's Estonian, Livonian and western Finnish varieties) used the non-plural stems (e.g., Est. kalade < * kala -ten ). Another defining characteristic of the east–west split
6630-624: The most part, the dialects operate on the same phonology and grammar. There are only marginal examples of sounds or grammatical constructions specific to some dialect and not found in standard Finnish. Two examples are the voiced dental fricative found in the Rauma dialect , and the Eastern exessive case . The Southwest Finnish dialects ( lounaissuomalaismurteet ) are spoken in Southwest Finland and Satakunta . Their typical feature
6732-529: The move. Some of the party's supporters have described themselves as centrists. The party has drawn people from left-wing parties but central aspects of their manifesto have gained support from right-wing voters as well. The Finns Party has been compared by international media to the other Nordic populist parties and other similar nationalist and right-wing populist movements in Europe. It also calls for austerity policies to curb deficit spending. In evaluating
6834-419: The need to improve the status of Finnish. Ever since the days of Mikael Agricola, written Finnish had been used almost exclusively in religious contexts, but now Snellman's Hegelian nationalistic ideas of Finnish as a fully-fledged national language gained considerable support. Concerted efforts were made to improve the status of the language and to modernize it, and by the end of the century Finnish had become
6936-453: The original pronunciation, still reflected in e.g. Karelian /čč : č/ ( meččä : mečän ). In the spoken language, a fusion of Western /tt : tt/ ( mettä : mettän ) and Eastern /ht : t/ ( mehtä : metän ) has resulted in /tt : t/ ( mettä : metän ). Neither of these forms are identifiable as, or originate from, a specific dialect. The orthography of informal language follows that of
7038-616: The other hand, is the main variety of Finnish used in popular TV and radio shows and at workplaces, and may be preferred to a dialect in personal communication. Standard Finnish is prescribed by the Language Office of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland and is the language used in official communication. The Dictionary of Contemporary Finnish ( Nykysuomen sanakirja 1951–61), with 201,000 entries,
7140-399: The party and generated debate within the party as well. Some critics of the policy called it overtly populist or said that the state should not interfere with the content of art. A poll commissioned by Helsingin Sanomat at the time of the controversy found that a majority of Finns, 51%, agreed with the party's stance on ending subsidies for postmodern art. Regarding immigration policy ,
7242-503: The party called for a prohibition on wearing the burqa and the niqāb in public. Timo Soini signed a pan-European charter against racism in 1998. However, in 2009, before the European Parliament election, Soini refused to sign an anti-racism appeal, saying that the appeal was an attempt to influence the party's choice of candidates (the appeal was drawn up by another political party). All other Finnish parties signed this appeal against racism. In May 2011, following controversies surrounding
7344-447: The party won only one seat in the Finnish parliament and soon filed for bankruptcy. In the summer of 1995, following the collapse of the Finnish Rural Party, the decision to found the Finns Party was made by Timo Soini , Raimo Vistbacka , Urpo Leppänen and Kari Bärlund. Soini had been the Rural Party's last party secretary and Vistbacka its last chair and MP . The party collected the five thousand signatures needed for registration and
7446-533: The party's 2011 manifesto emphasises welcoming work-based immigration, provided the immigrants pay taxes and abide by Finnish labour laws ; deporting immigrants guilty of serious or recurrent crimes or those that do not meet the Immigration laws; limiting family reunification to proven direct relatives only, and requiring means of subsistence from the immigrant; limiting humanitarian immigration strictly to refugee quotas (which should be adapted to correspond with
7548-585: The party's characteristic of being a "centre-left workers' party". After the 2019 election, the party joined the Identity and Democracy Group; however, this decision was reverted after the 2023 parliamentary election, with the Finns Party rejoining the ECR after a four-year break. Ideologically, the Finns Party has been described as right-wing and far-right . It is a nationalist and national-conservative party that opposes immigration , while on foreign stances it
7650-523: The party's voters included a higher percentage of blue-collar workers than those of the Social Democrats. Timo Soini led the Finns Party for twenty years, from 1997 until 2017. He was first elected to the parliament in 2003. He was the party's candidate in the 2006 presidential election , and was elected to the European Parliament in 2009 with the highest personal vote share in the country. He served as an MEP for two years, returning to
7752-420: The party. In April 2023, National Coalition Party leader Petteri Orpo announced his attention to form a governing coalition with the Finns Party, Swedish People's Party , and the Christian Democrats . In the Orpo Cabinet , the Finns have seven ministers out of 19. Former party leader Jussi Halla-aho was elected Speaker of the Parliament of Finland . When the Finns Party first gained representation in
7854-550: The party. This defector group, Blue Reform , continued to support the government coalition, while the Finns Party went into opposition. The party, having been reduced to 17 seats after the split, increased its representation to 39 seats in the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election , while Blue Reform failed to win any seats. During the 2023 Finnish parliamentary election , the Finns Party finished in second place with 46 seats, recording their strongest result since its founding. They then, out of Petteri Orpo ’s request, proceeded to form
7956-447: The phoneme / k / . Likewise, he alternated between dh and d to represent the allophonic [ ð ] (like th in English this ), between dh and z to represent / θː / (like th in thin , but longer in duration), and between gh and g to represent the allophonic [ ɣ ] . Agricola did not consistently represent vowel length in his orthography. Others revised Agricola's work later, striving for
8058-746: The region in the 18th and 19th centuries. Kven is an official minority language in Norway. The Eastern dialects consist of the widespread Savonian dialects ( savolaismurteet ) spoken in Savo and nearby areas, and the South-Eastern dialects now spoken only in Finnish South Karelia . The South Karelian dialects ( eteläkarjalaismurteet ) were previously also spoken on the Karelian Isthmus and in Ingria . The Karelian Isthmus
8160-536: The remarks of the Finns Party's MP Teuvo Hakkarainen , the Finns Party's parliamentary group issued a statement condemning all racism and discrimination, including affirmative action . The party invited other parties to sign the statement as well, but no other party did so. In December 2011, an opinion poll revealed 51% of Finns Party voters agreed with the statement, "Joihinkin rotuihin kuuluvat ihmiset eivät kerta kaikkiaan sovi asumaan moderniin yhteiskuntaan;" "People of certain races are unable to live within (fit into)
8262-467: The result by saying that half of the party's voters wanted him for president, while the other half wanted to him to remain as party chair. In municipal elections later in 2012 , the party got 12.3 percent of votes and 1,195 seats in the municipal councils, up more than 750 from the previous municipal election. However, this result saw the votes for the party shrink significantly from the 2011 parliamentary election result. The party got 12.9 percent of votes in
8364-415: The rhetoric used in the program as a refreshing change to the politically correct "jargon" of mainstream media, and believes that the Finns Party may have succeeded in gaining supporters from the traditional left-wing parties by presenting a more attractive form of criticism of neoliberalism than those parties. Ville Pernaa, political scientist, described the party's 2015 electoral program by stating that
8466-490: The role of national sovereignty in immigration issues: [True] Finnish immigration policy should be based on the fact that the Finns should always be able to decide for themselves the conditions under which a foreigner can come to our country and reside in our country. In 2015, the party's immigration programme included demands like lowering the refugee quota, tightening the conditions of family unification, ending affirmative action , outlawing begging in public places, opposing
8568-401: The second syllable of the word is short. The result is that some forms in the spoken language are shortened, e.g. tule-n → tuu-n ('I come'), while others remain identical to the standard language hän tulee "he comes", never * hän tuu ). However, the longer forms such as tule can be used in spoken language in other forms as well. The literary language certainly still exerts
8670-463: The split, MPs Veera Ruoho and Arja Juvonen left the Finns Party parliamentary group to continue as independents , after which the party's seats were reduced to fifteen. All of the defecting MPs were subsequently expelled from the Finns Party. In the following weeks, MPs Ritva Elomaa and Arja Juvonen regretted their decision and re-joined the party, raising the amount of MPs to seventeen. The party nominated MP Laura Huhtasaari as its candidate for
8772-636: The status of official minority languages, and thus can be considered distinct languages from Finnish. However, since these languages are mutually intelligible , one may alternatively view them as dialects of the same language . No language census exists for Norway, neither for Kven, standard Finnish, or combined. As of 2023, 7,454 first- or second-generation immigrants from Finland were registered as having Norwegian residency, while as of 2021, 235 Finns were registered as foreigners studying at Norwegian higher education. Great Norwegian Encyclopedia estimates Kven speakers at 2,000-8,000. Altogether, this results in
8874-527: The third largest party in the Parliament of Finland . In the 2015 election the party got 17.7% of the votes, making it the parliament's second-largest political party. The party was in opposition for the first 20 years of its existence. In 2015, it joined the coalition government formed by Prime Minister Juha Sipilä . Following a 2017 split, over half of the party's MPs left the parliamentary group and were subsequently expelled from their membership in
8976-465: The travel journal, the words are those of a Finnish bishop whose name is unknown. The erroneous use of gelen (Modern Finnish kielen ) in the accusative case, rather than kieltä in the partitive, and the lack of the conjunction mutta are typical of foreign speakers of Finnish even today. At the time, most priests in Finland spoke Swedish . During the Middle Ages, when Finland
9078-426: The unemployment rate: in 1995, the unemployment had been 15.4% and in 1999, it still stood at 10.2%. This was, as the governing parties pointed out, still a better record than the previous centre-right government's performance; during its term between 1991 and 1995, the unemployment had risen from 6.6% to 15.4%. The largest opposition party, the Centre Party , tried to become the largest party overall, and to re-join
9180-526: The unity of citizens is the basis of society, and wants to promote support for cultural activities that "promote Finnish identity". The party also calls for the removal of the obligatory character of the second official language (Swedish in Finnish-language schools and vice versa) in curriculums on all levels of education, freeing up time for the learning of other foreign languages such as English, German, French, Spanish and Russian (especially in
9282-499: The use of Finnish through parish clerk schools, the use of Swedish in church, and by having Swedish-speaking servants and maids move to Finnish-speaking areas. The first comprehensive writing system for Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola , a Finnish bishop, in the 16th century. He based his writing system on the western dialects . Agricola's ultimate plan was to translate the Bible , but first he had to develop an orthography for
9384-603: The use of public funds to advance multiculturalism , opposition to the planned burden-sharing mechanisms of the Common European Asylum Policy, making sure that immigrants living on welfare benefits are not concentrated in the same areas and only allowing the immigration of workers from outside the EU and EEA if they are found to be necessary in a given field in a means test by the Finnish Labour Office. In their 2019 election manifesto,
9486-492: The vicinity of the Ural Mountains . Over time, Proto-Uralic split into various daughter languages , which themselves continued to change and diverge, yielding yet more descendants. One of these descendants is the reconstructed Proto-Finnic , from which the Finnic languages developed. Current models assume that three or more Proto-Finnic dialects evolved during the first millennium BCE. These dialects were defined geographically, and were distinguished from one another along
9588-626: The western dialects preferred by Agricola retained their preeminent role, while many originally dialect words from Eastern Finland were introduced to the standard language, thus enriching it considerably. The first novel written in Finnish (and by a Finnish speaker) was Seven Brothers ( Seitsemän veljestä ), published by Aleksis Kivi in 1870. The dialects of Finnish are divided into two distinct groups, Western and Eastern. The dialects are largely mutually intelligible and are distinguished from each other by changes in vowels, diphthongs and rhythm, as well as in preferred grammatical constructions. For
9690-403: The western parts of Lapland are recognizable by retention of old "h" sounds in positions where they have disappeared from other dialects. One form of speech related to Northern dialects, Meänkieli , which is spoken on the Swedish side of the border is recognized in Sweden as its own distinct language, having its own standardized language separate from Finnish. This form of speech developed from
9792-437: The willingness to pay taxes is best guaranteed by a society unified by correct social policies – the electoral program warns against individualist policies, which weaken the solidarity among citizens. "The willingness to pay taxes is guaranteed by having a unified people", the program reads (p. 46). Some observers compared the Finns Party's fiscal policies to the old national Social Democratic taxation policy, which has given
9894-496: Was a prescriptive dictionary that defined official language. An additional volume for words of foreign origin ( Nykysuomen sivistyssanakirja , 30,000 entries) was published in 1991. An updated dictionary, The New Dictionary of Modern Finnish ( Kielitoimiston sanakirja ) was published in an electronic form in 2004 and in print in 2006. A descriptive grammar (the Large grammar of Finnish , Iso suomen kielioppi , 1,600 pages)
9996-522: Was added to the official party register on 13 October 1995. The first party congress was held in November. Vistbacka was elected party chair and Soini the party secretary. It took some time before the Finns Party gained ground in Finnish elections. At the time of its founding in 1995, the party's sole MP was Vistbacka, who was reelected in the 1999 election . In 2003 , the party won three seats: besides Vistbacka, Soini and Tony Halme were elected. In
10098-525: Was evacuated during World War II and refugees were resettled all over Finland. Most Ingrian Finns were deported to various interior areas of the Soviet Union. Palatalization , a common feature of Uralic languages, had been lost in the Finnic branch, but it has been reacquired by most of these languages, including Eastern Finnish, but not Western Finnish. In Finnish orthography, this is denoted with
10200-545: Was published in 2004. There is also an etymological dictionary, Suomen sanojen alkuperä , published in 1992–2000, and a handbook of contemporary language ( Nykysuomen käsikirja ). Standard Finnish is used in official texts and is the form of language taught in schools. Its spoken form is used in political speech, newscasts, in courts, and in other formal situations. Nearly all publishing and printed works are in standard Finnish. The colloquial language has mostly developed naturally from earlier forms of Finnish, and spread from
10302-543: Was the use of the reflexive suffix -(t)te , used only in the eastern dialects. The birch bark letter 292 from the early 13th century is the first known document in any Finnic language . The first known written example of Finnish itself is found in a German travel journal dating back to c. 1450 : Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho sommen gelen Emÿna daÿda (Modern Finnish: " Minä tahdon kernaasti puhua suomen kielen, [mutta] en minä taida; " English: "I want to speak Finnish, [but] I am not able to"). According to
10404-562: Was under Swedish rule , Finnish was only spoken . At the time, the language of international commerce was Middle Low German , the language of administration Swedish , and religious ceremonies were held in Latin . This meant that Finnish speakers could use their mother tongue only in everyday life. Finnish was considered inferior to Swedish, and Finnish speakers were second-class members of society because they could not use their language in any official situations. There were even efforts to reduce
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