Finland Culture & Language

Finnish culture is young as a national project — most of it was built deliberately in the nineteenth century to make the case that Finland was a nation — and it is unusually coherent as a result.

The Kalevala

Elias Lonnrot collected oral poetry across Karelia in the 1830s and assembled it into a national epic. It gave the independence movement its founding text, gave Sibelius and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela their subject matter, and, through J. R. R. Tolkien’s reading of it, shaped the sound of Elvish.

Music

Jean Sibelius wrote Finlandia in 1899 as a protest against Russian censorship, disguised at its premiere under an innocuous title. Finland today produces an improbable number of conductors and classical musicians, and an equally improbable amount of heavy metal.

Design and architecture

Alvar Aalto’s buildings and bent-plywood furniture, Eero Saarinen’s work abroad, Marimekko’s prints, Iittala glass and Arabia ceramics — a tradition of unornamented, useful, well-made things.

The Moomins

Tove Jansson’s books, written in Swedish, are read worldwide and are the country’s most exported story.

Sport and the odd competitions

Finland has produced Formula One champions and rally drivers out of all proportion to its size, and ice hockey is close to a national religion. It also invented a genre of deadpan competitive events — wife-carrying at Sonkajarvi, mobile-phone throwing, swamp football, air guitar in Oulu — which outsiders read as absurdist and Finns treat with a completely straight face. Both halves of that are worth knowing about.

Food

Rye bread, salmon soup, reindeer with lingonberry and mashed potato, Karelian pies with egg butter, and in late summer the berries — cloudberry, lingonberry, bilberry — that everyone picks.

Finnish is not Indo-European. It belongs to the Finno-Ugric family alongside Estonian and, distantly, Hungarian, and has fifteen cases, no grammatical gender, no future tense and no articles. It is unrelated to Swedish, Russian or anything else nearby, and it is hard.

Swedish is the second official language, the first language of about five per cent of Finns, mainly on the south and west coasts and in Aland, which is entirely Swedish-speaking. Signage is bilingual.

Sami languages — three of them in Finland — are official in the northern homeland.

English is spoken excellently by nearly everyone under sixty; you will not need anything else.

Useful anyway: hei for hello, kiitos for thank you, kippis as a toast, anteeksi for sorry and excuse me.