Why Does Finnish Sound Like Japanese? 🇫🇮 🇯🇵

No. It doesn't

We actually have popular jokes making fun of how japanese sounds like: What do you call a japanese car repair shop? Hajosikotoyotasi = hajosiko toyotasi = did your toyota break down (Edit: I had no idea this kind of jokes were so universal)

Vowel length does matter in Japanese in the exact same way as the Finnish example you gave. This comes up all the time but one common example is ビル (building) ビール (beer).

Sentence structure can also be surprisingly similar at times.

The only way it sounds similar to me is the rhythm of it, but tbf, I do speak Japanese, so I'm hyper aware of all the very non Japanese characteristics of Finnish.

They actually do sound similar, but the accents definetely give it away, if one was to speak in others language it would probably be hard to tell they are

I really liked the comparison between Finnish and Japanese, they have a lot of phonology in common, the intonation is similar. They are Asian Altaic languages. The sounds "in,on, en, an, un" the sounds "ka, Ke, ki, ko, ki,ku" "ta, te, ti, to, tu". I'm just talking about phonology and phonetics, there are even more interesting ones that build bridges between the 2 languages. I'm not surprised at all that Japanese passed through Siberia before reaching the Japanese islands, and the Finnish language left Siberia for the Scandinavian peninsula and never stopped being an Asian language. Cool video, I really enjoyed it. 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚

I have been thinking the same and i actually live in finland 😂

Finnish according to me: monotone Japanese according to me: ↗️↘️↗️↘️

My friends hear Karelian singing for the first time and ask me, what (Chinese) dialect is this

idk about sounding similar but they do have a lot of same words but they just mean different things examples: Kita finnish: jaws japanese: north Hana finnish: tap japanese: flower Kani finnish: Bunny japanese: crab Kutsu finnish: invitation japanese: shoes Kasa finnish: pile japanese: umbrella tori finnish: marketplace japanese: bird nami finnish: sweets japanese: wave risu finnish: twig japanese: squirrel sora finnish: gravel japanese: sky taru finnish: myth japanese: barrel

I've learnt Japanese when I was younger and am learning Finnish now! It does surprise me when I listen to Finnish words and question if it is actually Japanese instead, thanks for solving my question which I've been overthinking for months!

Ural-Altaic is not abandoned as a convergence zone however. There was real contact between these in the old days, even if they weren't related.

One thing about Japanese is that it used to have vowel harmony just like Finnish, but then it dropped its front vowels and hence it no longer needs it.

As a Finn learning Japanese, I've always found the language highly intuitive compared to something like Russian or Mandarin. The first thing that immediately popped up at me was how many similar words there are. Just off the top of my head: Kasa - 'pile' in Finnish, 'umbrella' in Japanese Aki - masculine first name in Finnish, 'autumn' / feminine first name in Japanese Kana - 'chicken' in Finnish, feminine first name in Japanese. If you ignore the pitch accent, the Japanese vowel consonant pairs, the Japanese 'r'/'l' sound being a mix of both, and couple of the more out there Finnish vowels, they're not all that different phonetically. Which is crazy considering there's seemingly no relation between the languages. And don't even get me started on the cultural similarities between the two countries.

I always make the joke that Japanese and Italian made a baby and their baby's name is Finnish 😊

stops are plosives are interchangeble. It's not because plosives have a puff of air and stops don't. In fact, Japanese stops /p t k/ have more aspiratition than finnish stops /p t k/.

its obviously a stretch to say they sound the same but some words do sound pretty japanese the spoken version of katsoa is katoa which sounds especially japanese when you conjugate it in the te imperative form (katokaa) the imperative forms of odottaa sound pretty japanese too (odota, odotakaa, etc) although in spoken finnish its usually shortened to oota

There are so many Finnish-sounding words in Japanese as a consequence of how the syllables in the latter are always formed with either a single vowel (a, i, u, e, o) or a consonant followed by a vowel (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko etc.), plus the abundance of double consonants. I studied the language up to a conversational level a few years ago and discovered a few words that (purely coincidentally) sounded a lot like their Finnish counterparts: せい sei = syy (fault, with some imagination you can probably hear the similarity here) 重ねる kasaneru = kasaantua (pile up, add up) 苦しみ kurushimi = kärsimys (suffering, again a bit of a stretch but yeah) きっぷ kippu = lippu (a train ticket) Plus the way the "no" particle is sometimes in casual speech shortened to a "-n" suffix that's identical to the genitive suffix used in Finnish. An example of this could be 俺ん家 oren chi = mun koti And let's not forget the really common, casual-ish interjection ねー nee~ which reminds me of how Finnish people also tend to insert "Nii!" or "Nii-i!"' into casual conversations. In the end those are still just funny coincidences, and while the grammar and sound of both languages is very similar at times, there's really nothing more to it IMO. Finnish and Japanese are vastly different and unrelated languages in the big picture.

I love the Altaic Sprachbund