1267: The Origins of Literary Finnish May 30, 2018

One thing which is often overlooked is that while there are a number of languages which are privileged in being taught more frequently than others, this is partly for practical reasons. Less than 10% of all languages have a standard written form, and far fewer have any sort of literature. This is an ongoing problem for man researchers now, but it means that sometimes, a language's literary history can be said to begin with only one person. This is true of professional linguists now, but in the past this was the work of proud writers, often poets, as is the case for Modern Italian, Modern Estonian, and Finnish. In the latter case, it was not just the case that people were originally using older form of the language as with the other examples, but that people were only writing in Swedish: a language not even related to Finnish. This changed in 1870 with the book Seitsemän Veljestä by Aleksis Kivi, who ironically has Swedish parents.