FINNISH
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
The terms Finns and Finnish people (Finnish: suomalaiset, Swedish: finländare) are used in English to mean "a native or inhabitant of Finland". They are also used to refer to the ethnic group historically associated with Finland or Fennoscandia, and they are only used in that sense here.
As with most ethnic groups, the definition of Finns may vary. Usually, in every definition, the term includes the Finnish-speaking population of Finland. The group can also be seen to include the Swedish-speaking population of Finland and the Finnish-speaking population of Sweden. Smaller populations that may or may not be seen to fall under the term Finns include the Kvens in Norway, the Tornedalians of Sweden and the Ingrian Finns of Russia. Finns can be divided according to dialect into subgroups sometimes traditionally called heimo, but such divisions have become less important with internal migration.
Linguistically, Finnish, spoken by most Finns, is closest related to the other Baltic-Finnic languages Estonian and Karelian, while Swedish, spoken by Swedish-speaking Finns, is unrelated to the Finnish language and a member of the Indo-European language family. Finnish has loanwords from Swedish, other Germanic and broader Indo-European languages in different chronological layers while Swedish has few loan words from the Baltic-Finnic languages. Genetically, Finns seem to be a fairly homogeneous group with a genetic heritage mostly in common with the other European ethnicities.
Genetics
Recently, mitochondrial (female lineage) and Y-chromosomal (male lineage) DNA-markers have been started to use in tracing back the history of human populations. As for the paternal and maternal genetic lineages of Finnish people and other peoples, see, e.g., the National Geographic Genographic Project and the Suomi DNA-projekti.
In essence, the types of mtDNA markers of Finnish people do not differ from those of other European ethnicities. Haplogroup U5, for example, estimated to be the oldest mtDNA haplogroup in Europe and found in the whole of Europe at a low frequency, seems to be found in significantly higher levels among Finns, Estonians and the Sami.
With regard to the Y-chromosome, besides the markers found in other European populations, the haplotype N3 appears in Finland at clearly higher frequencies than in most other European populations. Haplotype N3 is a subgroup of the haplogroup N (Y-DNA) distributed across northern Eurasia and estimated in a recent study to be 10,000–20,000 years old and suggested to have entered Europe about 12,000–14,000 years ago from Asia.
According to an earlier study conducted by four scientists, including Cavalli-Sforza LL:
Principal coordinate analysis shows that Lapps/Sami are almost exactly intermediate between people located geographically near the Ural mountains and speaking Uralic languages, and central and northern Europeans. Hungarians and Finns are definitely closer to Europeans. An analysis of genetic admixture between Uralic and European ancestors shows that Lapps/Sami are slightly more than 50% European, Hungarians are 87% European, and Finns are 90% European. There is basic agreement between these conclusions and historical data on Hungary. Less is known about Finns and very little about Lapps/Sami.
According to recent autosomal (genomewide, 10,000 markers instead of few looked at Y-DNA and MtDNA-studies) give distinct picture of Finnish genes. Finns are a genetic isolate. It could be said that all other Europeans have Finnish genes but Finns don't have all the genes found in other Europeans. Finns show very little if any Mediterranean and African genes but on the other hand almost 10% Finnish genes seem to be shared with some Siberian populations. Nevertheless more than 80% of Finnish genes are from single ancient North-European population, while most Europeans are admixture of 3 or more principal components.
Genetics of the Swedish-Speaking Finns
A few studies have shown that Swedish-speaking Finns, as a whole, today share affinities in their genetic make up more with other Finns and less with Swedes. Previously, it was thought that existence of the haplogroup I1a on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia reflected a direct spread of this marker from one side to the other but a recent study shows that the I1a on the western side of the Gulf of Bothnia and that on the eastern side have different histories. The same paper reports "a lack of association between the Western Finns and Swedes in SAMOVA analysis" and states that "the presence of the haplogroup in Finland and Karelia is not merely due to Swedish influence." Even today, there are, however, some people who erroneously believe that Swedish-speaking Finns as a whole are genetically or culturally more similar to Swedes than to Finns, and these views were widespread in the 19th century when scientists confused the concepts of language and genetics (called "race" at the time).
Theories of the Origin of Finns
In the 19th century, the Finnish researcher Matthias Castrén prevailed with the theory that "the original home of Finns" was in west-central Siberia. Later, the theory of an ancient homeland of all Finno-Ugric speaking peoples situated in a region between the Volga and Kama rivers in the European part of Russia appeared more credible. Until the 1970s, most linguists believed Finns to have arrived in Finland as late as the first centuries AD. Accumulating archaeological data, however, suggested that the area of contemporary Finland had been inhabited continuously from the ice-age onwards contrary to the earlier idea that the area had experienced long uninhabited intervals. One conclusion was that the ancestors of the Finns arrived in their present territory thousands of years ago, perhaps in many successive waves of immigration. During this immigration, the possible linguistic and cultural ancestors of the hunting-gathering Sami were pushed into the more remote northern regions.
Kalevi Wiik, a professor emeritus of phonetics at the University of Turku, postulated a controversial theory in the 1990s. According to Wiik, the ancestors of the Finns lived during the Ice Age in one of three habitable areas of southern Europe, so-called refugia, the two other habitable areas being the homes of the Indo-European and Basque languages. According to this theory, Finno-Ugric speakers spread to the north as the ice melted. They populated central and northern Europe, while Basque speakers populated western Europe. As agriculture spread from the south-west into Europe, the Indo-European languages spread among the hunter-gatherers. In this process, both the hunter-gatherers speaking Finno-Ugric and those speaking Basque learned how to cultivate land and became Indo-Europeanized. According to Wiik, this is how the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic languages were formed. Due to their isolated location, the linguistic ancestors of modern Finns did not switch their language. Wiik's theory, the main supporters of which are Ago Künnap, Kyösti Julku and Angela Marcanio, has attrated strong criticism from other scholars. Especially Raimo Anttila, Petri Kallio and brothers Ante and Aslak Aikio have renounced Wiik's theory with strong words, even hinting on right-wing tendencies among Wiik's supporters. The most heated debate took place in the Finnish journal Kaltio during autumn 2002. Since then, the debate has calmed, each side retaining their positions.
Haplogroup U is a group of people who descend from a woman who lived around 50,000 years ago in the Haplogroup R branch of the Genographic tree. Her descendants gave birth to several subgroups, some of which exhibit specific geographic homelands. For example a subgroup U5 is restricted to Finland and it's populations. This is likely the result of geographical, linguistic and cultural isolation of the Finnish populations that has kept it fairly isolated genetically. Haplogroup U5 that first evolved in Europe is a group of people who descend from a woman who lived around 15,000 years ago. U5 is found also in small frequencies and at much lower diversity in the Near East and parts of Africa, suggesting back-migration of people from northern Europe to the south.
One of the men in a group of Eurasian Clan peoples who was probably born in Siberia within the last 10,000 years gave rise to the LLY22G marker which defines haplogroup N in the Genographic tree. Today his descendants effectively trace a migration of Uralic-speaking peoples during the last several thousands of years like the Sami people, the people of Northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia. The Sami also have U5 lineages in their population indicating that it may have introduced during their migration into these northern territories.
A genetic link between Sami and the Volga-Ural region of Russia has been found, indicative of a more recent contribution of people from the Volga-Ural region to the Sami population as recently as 2700 years ago.
Svecoman Movement in 19th Century Finland
A language strife developed in the Grand Duchy of Finland in the 19th century, supported by Finnish speaking nationalists, the Fennomans, which aimed at raising the majority language, Finnish language, from peasant-status it had during the Swedish reign to the position of a national language and status. These were opposed by the the Swedish speaking minority living in Finland, called Svecomans and best represented by the linguist Axel Olof Freudenthal (1836-1911), who defended the use of the Swedish language against Finnish. Svecomans were influenced by Herder, Gobineau, Blumenbach (1752-1840) and others racialist theorists, and thus considered that Finland was separated into two discrete "races," one speaking Finnish, and the other, superior one, assimilated to the "Germanic race," spoke Swedish. The racial theory was finally disproven by genetics: the genetics of Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking Finns do not differ from each other.
