Ағылшын-фин тілдерінің қоспасы: Финглиш

Mixture of English and Finnish languages
Finnish mixed with English

The term Finglish was coined by professor Martti Nisonen in the 1920s in Hancock, Michigan, United States, to describe a mixture of Finnish and English he encountered in America. The word is first recorded in English in 1943. As the term describes, Finglish is a macaronic mixture of the English and Finnish languages. In Finglish, the English lexical items are nativized and inserted into the framework of Finnish morphology and syntax. Many consider the adoption of English loanwords into Finnish phonology, morphology, and syntax not to be proper Finnish, but rather a language in between. The term Finglish can imply that this adoption of loanwords and usage of language is incomplete and somehow less legitimate. However, this use of loanwords and code switching amongst bilingual speakers is typical in communities experiencing language shift. The Finnish immigrants of the United States learned English out of necessity to succeed in their jobs; the results of this resulted in what is known as Finglish. Finglish is also found in any place in Finland where international contact and popular culture exists, including Finnish language learners. This more recent (post 1980s) incorporation of English loanwords into modern Finnish as a result of globalization and advances in technology is a separate phenomenon from the North American Finnish, which developed primarily in the late 1800s to mid 1900s, though there are some similarities in form and function.

While almost all Finnish immigrants were able to read and write, it still took some time for many Finns to learn English because Finnish is a Finno Ugric language, structurally unrelated to English and other Indo European languages. Another reason for the delay is that many leaving Finland were farmers and laborers, and often migrated to areas of high Finnish settlement. Living and working with other Finnish speakers meant they had less need to learn English to get by in their day to day lives. Many other Finnish immigrants ended up in menial and industrial jobs, where they learned English through practice in order to get by in the workplace. Second and third generation Finnish Americans often learned to speak both Finnish and English, though the Finnish they learned differed from that spoken in Finland. This was due to a variety of reasons, including competing language inputs between Finnish and English and the fact that their Finnish input may have been different from that considered standard in Finland. Finglish originated amongst these first and second generation Finnish immigrants in US and Canada. The English language skills of the first generation American Finns tended to be limited; second and third generation American Finns usually were more or less bilingual. Finglish emerged as a pidgin with something they already knew (Finnish) and something they were bound to learn (English). As has been documented for several immigrant languages, one would expect that over time North American Finnish would reduce its inflectional system in favor of prepositions and analytic constructions. Nominal morphology is particularly vulnerable in heritage languages with robust morphology. As heritage speakers tend to become fluent in the majority language while never achieving native fluency in the heritage language, second and third generation speakers who learn the minority language from the first generation may not acquire the full inflectional system of the language spoken in the country of origin. The majority language may also influence the syntax and other features of the heritage language. Thus, North American Finnish differed not only in the lexical items used, but in aspects of morphology and syntax as well. The majority of immigrants to America came from Ostrobothnia and the Northern Ostrobothnia areas in western Finland; over sixty percent of all emigrants who left the country between 1893 and 1920 came from Vaasa and Oulu. Many other Finnish immigrants were from the provinces of Savonia and Tavastia, and the Finnish spoken in North America also reflects those dialects.

Sometimes English words are used as the basis of Finnish conceptual neologisms, like nörtti 'computer enthusiast', from English nerd; or nyypiö, nyyppä, or noobi 'newbie', i. e. 'beginner' (the first two variants influenced by the native Finnish hyypiö, meaning a 'freak' or 'eccentric person'). Since most current Finglish users are fluent in Finnish and to some extent English, direct translations are sometimes used in humorous or oxymoronic concepts, such as julkinen talo (literally 'public house') for pubi (borrowed long ago from English), or käytännöllinen pila (lit. 'practical joke') for native Finnish kepponen ('prank', 'shenanigan'). English loanwords that originate in Latin are usually amalgamated in Finnish by using the Latin and not English orthography and grammar.