Finnish is one of the Finno-Ugrian family of languages, and being historically linked with Swedish, can be compared with that language, particularly in its vocabulary. There are about five million native speakers of the language and large Finnish-speaking minorities in Norway, Sweden, the USA and Canada. It is a morphologically rich language, which has 15 cases and a variety of finite and non-finite verbal categories. Its inflectional suffixes have a wide range of grammatical functions and a large number of derivational affixes, providing a productive source of word formation. It has a complex vowel system. This descriptive grammar explores many interesting details of Finnish syntax, morphology, phonology and lexicon, providing the linguist, for the first time in English, with the opportunity for cross-language comparisons and making this important language accessible to a wide range of theoretical and descriptive linguistic analysis.
