The Linguistical Lone Wolf

Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are the Finnish Origins? This is what Richard D. Lewis wonders in his book called "Finland, Cultural Lone Wolf (2005), which is basically an introduction to Finland and Finnish culture. This is what bothers me sometimes. I mean, here we are, the Finnish people, living in Finland, speaking Finnish. This Nordic country sharing borders with Sweden, Norway and Mother Russia. Still, we don't share the same language.

How is that possible? Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages, but the rest of Skandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark) belong to the language family of Indoeuropean Germanic origin. Russia also belongs to the Indoeuropean language family, but to the Slavic part of it. Finnish doesn't sound anything like Russia or the other Skandinavian languages. Our mentality is part Skandinavian, part Slavic and part European but our language is extremily rare. How is it possible for us to have deveploped a new language so close to other language families?

There are various speculative theories about the time and place of the origin of the so-called Proto-Finno-Ugrian language. According to the most common theory, Hungarian and Finnish are separated by a mere 6,000 years of separate development. The Finno-Ugrian languages share enough common lexical and grammatical features to prove a common origin.

I guess we just separated from other Finno-Ugrians thousands of years ago and went our own way and established the Finnish language. Well, of course we had to, the others were just too chatty for our taste.