It is not particularly joyful to make guesses about how long the nation-state project will remain intact, and thus how long the main language of Finland will be Finnish. The question may still be justifiable in the pressures of various signs of globalisation and climate change. While pondering an answer, it is good to remember that although Baltic-Finnic languages, let alone the wider Ugric language family, are very old, the modern Finnish we speak and write today has been mostly formed through translations.

Over the 19th century, along with state autonomy, Finland wanted to open possibilities for itself to follow in the footsteps of the old civilised countries, and this required translations of classic works from Germany, France and other countries. It was hoped that the translations would make Finnish writers accustomed to using Finnish in their writing and to make them produce the national literature, which was seen as inevitable for a nation-state. The majority of writers were erudite Swedish-speaking Finns, as the peasants did not write too much of anything.

A good example is Julius Krohn, a German-speaker by birth, who had merged into the Swedish-speaking intelligentsia but who changed his home language to Finnish and led the project of translating Runeberg’s ‘Vänrikit’ starting from the 1860s. He is most likely also behind the translation of the poem ‘Vårt land’, attributed to Paavo Cajander – that is, our national anthem.