Lesson 2 - Kven vs Finnish

According to Kainun kielen grammatikki written by linguist Eira Söderholm, Kven and standard written Finnish only share 53% of morphological similarity. However, this number may not represent mutual intelligibility between the two. While the extent may vary from dialect to dialect, they are said to be highly similar in terms of written form and spoken form.

Kven is distinguished from Standard Finnish by its lexicon. Kven contains many loanwords from Norwegian and the Sami languages.

Standard Finnish	Kven	English
hallinto	rejeerinki	government
yrittää	freistata	to try
kielioppi	grammatikki	grammar
runo	dikti	poem
englanti	engelska	English language
revontulet	taivhaanvalkkeet	Aurora borealis
lippu	flaku	flag
näyttö	šärmi	screen

 

There are also notable differences in grammatical features. Due to lack of quantitative analysis on Kven grammar, there are still a number of uncertainties that need to be confirmed, as the language is yet to be standardized. Based on my research, I concluded several grammatical features of Kven that are different from Standard Finnish.

Standard Finnish	Kven	Description
Vesi on lämmintä	Vesi oon lämmin	In Finnish, partitive case is used as the complement when the subject is an abstract object. In Kven, nominative is always used.
Me olemme norjalaisia.	Met olema ruijalaiset.	In Finnish, partitive plural is used when the subject is in plural. In Kven, nominative plural is used instead.
Äiti ja isä asuvat Suomessa.	Muori ja faari asuthaan Suomessa.	In Finnish, -vat is used for verbs in 3rd person plural. In Kven, present passive is used for verbs in 3rd person plural. This is different from Finnish, where passive form is used as verbs for 1st person plural in colloquial speech.
On tärkeää, että…	Se oon tärkkee ette…	In Finnish, "on + adjective" is always in partitive. In Kven, not only is "tärkkee" in nominative form, but the word "se" is also required. This makes the translation identicle to "it is important that…" in English