DISAPPEARING FINNISH.

January 14, 2004 by 7 Comments

An article on the decline in the use of Finnish among emigrant communities abroad. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)

Comments

  1. des says
    January 15, 2004 at 4:13 am

    What do the American reggae band Conga Se Menne and the Latvian rock band Liv ir dziv have in common? Both names refer to disappearing languages and disappearing worlds. The name of the rock band is in Latvian […]

    Journalistes, isn’t it? I was in Latvia not three (3) weeks ago, and the language didn’t even look unwell, whatever Erkki Lyytikäinen says.

  2. Bertilo Wennergren says
    January 15, 2004 at 9:17 am

    The language supposed to gasping for survival was not Latvian, but Livonian.

  3. des says
    January 15, 2004 at 10:18 am

    Oops. Readers, also, isn’t it?

  4. TheloniousZen says
    January 15, 2004 at 4:02 pm

    Conga Se Menne does just about everything in english though. They’re from my region. About 85% of the people here are of Finnish descent, and a lot of the older people still know the languages because their parents were the ones who emigrated here. Looking in the obituaries one sees the names Toivo, Eino, and Olly an awful lot.

  5. zizka says
    January 15, 2004 at 8:32 pm

    Marginally relevant: In Astoria Oregon a Chinese immigrant family encouraged their kids to talk to the neighbor kids to learn the language, and the kids did quite well. But they had a terrible shock when their kids started first great. They had been learning Finnish.
    One of the kids continued with his Finnish and became regionally well-known (and even legendary). He joined the postal service as a mailman and was able to chat with his Finnish customers.
    Supposedly many Namibians speak some Finnish because of missionary activities and scholarships to Finnish universities.

  6. zizka says
    January 15, 2004 at 11:20 pm

    First grade.

  7. Prentiss Riddle says
    January 20, 2004 at 6:00 pm

    Shades of the “East Timorese schoolchildren learning Finnish” legend.
    Which reminds me of another factoid I read once in a folk music magazine. The orthography of Malagassy, the national language of Madagascar, is rather daunting; supposedly it is because the people who devised its first writing system in the Roman alphabet were Welsh missionaries! God must really have been angry at poor Madagascar.

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