Backgrou

I.S. Tomolovsky

The Rise of Rufski?

Encyclopaedic note:

Finnish was a language that was spoken in Finland until the 21st century.

Swedish was a language that was spoken throughout large parts of Scandinavia just some generations ago. It has been claimed that there must have been Swedes in Finland!

Finnish — one of the Finno-Ugrian languages, closely related to the still surviving Estonian language — was shaped and preserved by religion and nationalism in the late Middle Ages. Although there is some evidence to show that Finnish was in use during the late 21st century, when the European Union was still a dominant political entity, the latest "written" record known to survive in Finnish is an e-mail message dating from the beginning of the 21st century. Finnish was probably once spoken roughly in the territory of the present Federal Republic of Finland and in adjacent areas of Russia. Some researchers think that it began to decline rapidly after the Soviet Union ceased to exist in the early 1990's, and the Russian language became a second major language in large parts of Europe, after English, of course. Finnish and Estonian were also spoken by migrants, and descendants of migrants, throughout Europe. Of the present-day population of Finland, ca. 8.9 million — i.e. the vast majority — speak English (actually a rather peculiar variation of English, often referred to as Finglish) as their first language. Of the total population of Finland, approximately 3 million Finnish citizens speak Russian as their first language and, depending on the statistical source, between 15,000 and 25,000 (mainly residents of Western and Central Finland) speak a non-literary language, sometimes called Härmä (Rufski); most speakers of Russian and the Rufski dialects of Finland are also competent in Finglish.

The Finns and Russians living in Finland are almost all bilingual, the Russians perhaps even equilingual, whereas the Finns can be characterized as ambilingual. However, many of them do not speak Russian, but prefer using English. Curiously, the latter often call their language Finnish, but it certainly is very reminiscent of English, and it is commonly regarded as a local variation of English, sometimes referred to as Finglish.

The minority group of the so-called Härmä speakers has recently caused problems for the central administrative authorities as they refuse to use either English (Finglish) or Russian when confronted with official matters. They maintain that the Finns are not Finns at all, and that they are the real Finns instead. This curious minority group seems not to be satisfied by our English-Russian-European society and its human rights that allow us to choose one of the two languages in any situation.

What is this language that the native speakers occasionally call Finnish, and some linguists "Rusfish", "Finrush", "Firsian" or "Rufski"? Has it really something to do with the extinct Finnish language that the Finns (who long ago forgot their ancestors' language) refer to as an ancient "European language of high culture" with a rich literature (which nobody seems to have read)? A considerable number of the native speakers of Rufski are black, but specialists assure us that the percentage is not higher than among the English and Russian speaking population in Finland, and that the language is by no means of African origin.

The relationship of Rufski to Finnish is not clear, but there are reasons to describe it as a direct descendant of Finnish (as suggested in Tomolovsky 2177). Attempts to reconstruct the development from ancient Finnish origins are inevitably speculative, as the research into historical and Finno-Ugrian linguistics has been neglected for hundreds of years, due to the lack of interest which must have happened very soon after the social status of Finnish had dropped.

While linguists and ethnographers used to believe that speakers of Germanic and Baltic languages had once inhabited the lands later occupied by speakers of Finnish, the "rise" of Rufski is a piece of evidence which allows us to take for granted that a large number of Russian speakers living in Finland have changed their language, and thus influenced the language spoken in the country for perhaps the last 300 years. Let us consider the following extracts from a manuscript written in the 20th century (unfortunately, the rest of the paper has not been preserved):

2)
[—] Prosodics
— Long vowels are shortened, at least after the first syllable (cf. the development in Estonian).
— Loss of vowel harmony and the disappearance of the front vowels after the 1st syllable.
— These changes are due to the assumed preservation of the Finnish first syllable stress by Russian speakers.
— One of the independent tendencies in Modern Finnish will be supported by Russian speakers: the disappearance of /ä/ and its turning into /a/.
— On the contrary, another attested tendency will not be supported, namely, that of a more rigorous vowel harmony as in:
seitsämän pro seitsemän 'seven'
järjästää pro järjestää 'organize'
tiedätään pro tiedetään (indefinite-personal form of 'to know') [—]

3)
[— ] Morphology
— The case system is in general preserved, but changes in the functions of the cases are generated by syntactic and semantic reinterpretations. For example, the Genitive will, of course, not disappear as a case of possession, etc., but it will certainly disappear as the case of the object.
— The destiny of the predicative attribute cases, the Essive and the Translative, will depend on the interpretation of the Russians' anxiety to cut off the Finnish case forms ending in a vowel. I assume that the endings are preserved as such, but that their functions will merge in one of these two cases that often are both rendered (if at all) with the Instrumental in Russian. In Russian, the latter might be in the process of becoming more rare, often being replaced by the Nominative or the Accusative, depending on the nature of the attributive connection, i.e., whether the predicative is attached to the subject or to the object. So, it seems reasonable to predict that one of these Finnish cases, at least, will get lost. I will take a chance and let the Essive decline as a more or less grammatical case, giving it a future existence merely as a relic in lexicalized forms as kotona 'at home', takana 'behind', etc. The Finnish Translative will, instead, be used in some cases reflecting the use of the Russian Instrumental (as in tehdä todeksi 'make true/real', cf. Russ. sdelat' real'nym).
— Some case forms will also be truncated because of the shortening of the vowels in the non-first syllables.
— In the verb inflection, the indefinite-personal (ambipersonal) forms will replace the first person Pl. form, while the 2nd and the 3rd person Pl. forms are replaced by the 3rd person Sg. form. [—]

4)
[—] Syntax
— Analytic verb (tense) forms are truncated; they will lose the auxiliary finite verb form. It means, firstly, that the use of an explicite subject will be necessary to distinguish between the persons. Secondly, it means that the Pluperfect disappears. Furthermore, the functions of the two remaining past forms will probably be reinterpreted (as suggested by evidence from many languages).
— Sentence adverbs will tend to be placed before the finite verb — Objects, especially short ones, will tend to be placed before the finite verb.
— The Genitive is lost as the object case and replaced by the Nominative or Partitive. the Genitive will, of course, not disappear as a case of possession, etc., but it will certainly disappear as the case of the object. It will be replaced by the Partitive and the Nominative. Due to phonetic development, the Nominative is also a natural outcome of some types of the Partitive forms, too (e.g. rahaa > *raha, cf. the Estonian with its complications). The loss of the Partitive / Nominative distinction is a consequence of the vowels shortening at the end of words (see above). It is also possible that a reinterpretation of the object cases will take the course suggested by differentiation between animate and non-animate, as in Russian (the Genitive becomes the object case of animate entities, and the Partitive becomes an Accusative, i.e. the object case of any other entities/words; thus, a new Accusative is created from the old Partitive, whereas the Genitive form will replace it for animate objects).
— The process that was described above contributes to the fact that the Partitive will not be recognized as an independent case form. The loss of the long vowel Partitive (räkä, räkää > *räkä, räkä; pala, palaa > *pala, pala) and the similarity of the Partitive elsewhere with the Elative will have the consequent effect that both cases get merged (today, there are people, also philologists, who say, for example: "you should use the Partitive in the heading", meaning that the heading should read Elämästä instead of Elämä). The syntactic and the semantic effects of the latter change will be that the Partitive and the Elative will be regarded as one case form.
— The Partitive will gain ground as the subject case, too.
— On the other hand, the Partitive will be replaced by a kind of degenerated Elative, since the Partitive often coincides in form with the Nominative.
— The Essive will be replaced by analytic constructions in the predicative attribute use:
Minä tiesin sen jo pikku poikana 'I knew it already when I was a little boy'
> *Mä tiesin sitä jo kun pikkupoika.
— The Translative will partly take over the functions of the Essive and will be preserved also in other functions.
— Due to the development of the object cases, a new aspect differentiation will grow out of phrasal verbs and Momentative derivatives (perfectivization), as well as through the grammaticalization of the Frequentative suffix as an Imperfective marker.
— Another possible process is the development of an aspect distinction in the past, as the new truncated Perfect forms may receive an interpretation as Past Perfective forms.
— Also, the marking of the imperfective future will become compulsory, as well as the marking of the on-going process meaning by the progressive construction: [—]

On the basis of the evidence supplied by the quotations from the recently discovered manuscript written by an anonymous linguist at the end of the 20th century, I am now quite sure, that the language referred to as Rufski etc. is indeed a successor of the Finnish language we have all thought that had died out long ago. In very many instances the author of the manuscript has been right as he or she has put forward hypotheses how the Finnish language would develop under new circumstances (N.B. From these fragments we can conclude that just two hundred years ago practically no Russian was spoken in Finland. That is interesting, because the other state language, English, as far as we can see, has always been a dominating language in Finland).

The growth of a national consciousness in the last decade started among a small number of intellectuals who desire to cultivate a national identity of their own rooted in the Rufski language. They aim to have a Language Edict issued which would acknowledge Rufski as having the status of a national language alongside with English (Finglish) and Russian. However, it is hard to codify a literary language on the base of various dialects, some of which are either archaic Finnic or "Finnish influenced", and others which are more or less influenced by Russian and/or Finglish. There is a number of dialects from which the attempts to create a literary Rufski language are taking shape. They are being spoken in southern and western Finland. The available data indicate a large but uncontinuous area, inhabited by Rufski speakers. It begins from the totally Russian dominated Savonia county (ex-Savonlinna, in Russ. Savburg), and comes to an end in the neighbourhood of the entirely English-speaking Western Coast. The mixture in Finland of influences from different directions accounts for the present-day distribution of linguistic and ethnographical features along this axis.

Finnish was an agglutinative language like Hungarian. Rufski can not be regarded as such, but it has some consistent regularities in its morphology. Inflectional suffixes have a range of grammatical functions, while most of the derivational suffixes that can be distinguished are not productive. However, like in Finnish, the case system is complex enough. On the other hand, the verbal categories are rather reminiscent of the North Russian system, even though there are dialectal sub-systems in Rufski favouring periphrastic progressive and future forms.

To read some more about Rufski, click here!