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Finnish (, or ''suomen kieli'' (:ˈsuomen ˈkieli)) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, a dialect of Finnish, is spoken in Northern Norway. Finnish is the eponymous member of the Finnic language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence. ==Classification== Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages. The Finnic group also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea. Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with other Uralic languages in several respects including: *Shared morphology: * *case suffixes such as genitive ''-n'', partitive ''-(t)a'' / ''-(t)ä'' ( < Uralic *-ta, originally ablative), essive ''-na'' / ''-nä'' ( < *-na, originally locative) * *plural markers ''-t'' and ''-i-'' ( < Uralic *-t and *-j, respectively) * *possessive suffixes such as 1st person singular ''-ni'' ( < Uralic *-n-mi), 2nd person singular ''-si'' ( < Uralic *-ti). * *various derivational suffixes (e.g. causative ''-tta/-ttä'' < Uralic *-k-ta) *Shared basic vocabulary displaying regular sound correspondences with the other Uralic languages (e.g. ''kala'' 'fish' ~ North Saami ''guolli'' ~ Hungarian ''hal''; and ''kadota'' 'disappear' ~ North Saami ''guođđit'' ~ Hungarian ''hagy'' 'leave (behind)'. Several theories exist as to 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. The Finns are more genetically similar to their Indo-European-speaking neighbours than to the speakers of the geographically close Uralic language Sami. It has been argued that a native Finnic-speaking population absorbed northward migrating Indo-European speakers who adopted the Finnic language, giving rise to the modern Finns.〔(ThisisFINLAND-Who is afraid of Finnish ? )〕 The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, classifies Finnish as a level III language (of 4 levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Defense Language Institute )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Finnish language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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