What Finnish Sounds Like

"All around me I was hearing the Finnish language (suomea) for the first time – a gripping experience for a sound-hungry linguist. Its abundance of vowels and flowing liquidity at first remind one of Italian or Polynesian, but, as one listens, one detects underlying, vibrant sinews unheard in southern tongues, yet quite unlike tough, thrusting Germanic. The impressive length of its regimented nouns and adjectives, the musicality of its coordinated case endings, the rippling sonority of its convoluted sentences, all hint at the artistic, tenacious soul of a people come from afar. The language has in it is swishing coniferous forests and boisterous Arctic streams that we hear in the music of Sibelius, the loneliness and cold melancholy of the northern lakes, the unlimited, invigorating roaming of the Central Asian steppes, the vitality and perseverance of adventurous, hardened, migrant explorers. I sat and listened in awe, understanding not a word, but completely captivated by the unfaltering harmonics of this nimble Asian tongue. For me it was more entertaining than any symphony."

Quoted in Finland, Cultural Lone Wolf by Richard Lewis (2005)