In addition to the two acts, I was surprised to find that Finns have had their fingers in other countries’ Eurovision pies, too: besides Erika Vikman’s stage show, designer Ari Levelä has participated in creating the visuals for Austria and Cyprus, and Estonia’s song Espresso Macchiato is co-written and produced by Finnish songwriter Johannes Naukkarinen. It is indeed a very exciting Eurovision year for Finland!
The grand finale takes place late tonight, 22.00 / 10 p.m. our time, and it’s going to run at least four hours. (Gosh, I almost have a headache from the mere thought of staying up that late!)
I’m really torn. I really hope KAJ wins, because Bara bada bastu is so joyful, cozy, and sweet, exactly what the world needs right now. But only if KAJ guys get to keep their quirkiness, happiness, and wholesomeness, because it’s part of their charm, and you can’t do that if you’re sleep deprived and exhausted and harangued by media and fans alike. Plus, it would give Sweden their 8th Eurovision win, pushing them ahead of Ireland (both have seven wins ATM), which as a Nordic person I would LOVE.
At the same time, though, Erika Vikman’s win would be stupendous—it would be the second time Finland wins, the first win for a female solo artist from Finland, and a win for female empowerment. It’s a catchy song with a great beat at the end, and a challenging tune (i.e., meant for a skilled singer). Apparently, after Thursday’s second semifinal there’s been a surge of interest; some have even wondered whether she might really turn out to be this year’s dark horse.
Moreover, Erika’s is an act where a grown-up woman dresses and sings how she wants, instead of a serving of bare female flesh centered around stereotypical male sexual desire (i.e., a slip of a girl decked up in barely-there sparkly cover-ups furiously gyrating and tossing her hair). (*cough* Cyprus 2018, Cyprus 2019, Cyprus 2021 *cough*) Acts are acts, sure, but like KAJ’s, Erika’s seems to contain a certain amount of authenticity that people respond to.
Ohwell. In the end, I suspect I’ll just be overjoyed that Finland has two such strong contenders this year. Following Käärijä’s second place in 2023, recent years have been exceedingly good from the point of view of Finnish Eurovision fans, and that’s not something to sneeze at. 🙂
As a cherry on top, all of the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland) AND all of the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) qualified for the grand final. All at the same time, for the first time. Yay for us smaller countries in the north! 🙂
(A super-short recap of his post: the song Bara bada bastu, ‘Just having a sauna’, despite representing Sweden, is in fact performed by the Finnish comedy group KAJ. As a result of KAJ’s popularity, Swedes and Finns are finding a new spirit of Eurovision togetherness, and it has also brought some international recognition to the little-known Swedish-speaking minority in Finland.)
Here, as a companion post, is a listing of cultural references in KAJs song and in the performance.
I’m pulling some of this from my own experience growing up in Finland, but others from online commentary, or my Swedish-Finnish friends’ stories. This list is, therefore, likely not to be complete. Additions are very welcome!
KAJ—which rhymes with the English word guy—is made up of Kevin Holmström, Axel Åhman, and Jakob Norrgård, who all originally hail from Vörå, Ostrobothnia, Finland. The idea behind the song is to gently poke fun at how Swedes view Finns and our culture. Here we go! 🙂
Bara bada bastu by KAJ is the song representing Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest 2025, and it’s been shaking things up in Sweden, Finland, and the Eurovision bubble as a whole. If you haven’t been following the run-up to Eurovision 2025, you may not know the story of Bara bada bastu and why it matters so much to so many people. Here’s a short introduction to get you caught up.
Finland, Sweden, and Swedish-speaking Finns
Finland and Sweden have a long and complicated history, grounded in the fact that what is today Finland was conquered by Sweden in the Middle Ages and ruled as part of the Swedish kingdom for centuries. Until recently, Finland was largely a poor and undeveloped area compared with metropolitan Sweden. The elite in Finland were traditionally Swedish transplants or had close social ties to Sweden. As a result, the typical Finnish stereotype of a Swede is a stuck-up, rich dandy, while the Swedish stereotype of a Finn is an uncultured, violent drunk. It is an old joke in Finland to say (of a hockey game, or some other equally serious contest) “I don’t care who wins as long as Sweden loses.”
Relations are not purely hostile. The two countries also have a history of cooperation and mutual support. Sweden supported Finland’s self-defense against and recovery from Russian invasion in World War II, and it has long been a commonplace that Finland is Sweden’s first line of defense. Despite this solidarity, there is still a lingering antagonism. When Finland and Sweden joined NATO in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, it was important to both sides that they join together. It was also important to Finns that Finland was accepted into the alliance first.
Caught in the midst of this sibling rivalry are the Swedish-speaking Finns. Finland has a minority population who speak Swedish as their mother tongue, mostly concentrated in the cities in the south and along the western coast and islands. They make up about five percent of the population. Some are descended from the old Swedish aristocracy, but most of them these days are just ordinary folks, not much different from other Finns. Because of this population and Finland’s historical ties to Sweden, Swedish is the second official language in Finland, and Finnish-speakers are required to learn Swedish in school (just as Swedish-speakers are required to learn Finnish). Many Finnish-speaking Finns resent this language requirement, and some turn that resentment against their Swedish-speaking neighbors. Swedish-speaking Finns are stereotyped in much the same way as Swedes: rich, snobby, and stuck-up. While Swedish-speaking Finns are subject to this sort of low-level resentment and caricaturing at home, they are practically invisible to the rest of the world. Even in Sweden, not everyone knows that some of their Finnish neighbors speak Swedish as their first language.
The Eurovision Song Contest
Leaving aside the world of frosty Finns and snooty Swedes for a moment, let me introduce you to the next thing you need to know about: the Eurovision Song Contest. The Eurovision Song Contest (commonly just called Eurovision) is an annual multinational extravaganza in which countries from around Europe and beyond (G’day, Australia!) compete in putting on musical performances. The exact format and rules have changed frequently since the contest was first held in 1956, but if you’re not up on Eurovision, here are the essentials you need to know.
Every participating country sends one stage act with a song (not longer than three minutes).
Every country chooses its competing act in whatever way it likes. Many production and performance teams are international, and while at least some members of the overall team usually come from the country they are representing, nothing requires the artists appearing onstage to come from or be in any way connected with that country. (Write this down! It’ll be important later!)
The participating acts compete against one another in two semifinals. The viewing audience votes a set number of acts from each semifinal into the four-hour grand final, where they join a small set of acts from countries who get an automatic place by paying the major costs of the broadcast (currently: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom).
After all the acts have performed in the grand final, two sets of votes are collated. In each participating country, a jury made up of music industry professionals awards points to their top ten favorite songs. The top song gets 12 points, the second 10, and rest from 8 down to 1. The viewing audience in each country also gets to vote on their favorite songs, with points awarded in the same way. (Neither juries nor audience are allowed to vote for their own country.)
The points are announced onstage in dramatic fashion, and the country with the most combined points wins.
Traditionally, the winning country each year hosts the next year’s contest, although exceptions are sometimes made (such as in 2023, when Ukraine won the contest, but because of the ongoing war, the runner-up, United Kingdom, stepped in as host).
The Eurovision Song Contest has been a venue for good-spirited competition between nations, using music to foster both national pride and international solidarity in much the same way the Olympic Games use sports. It has also created its own subculture with traditions, factions, customs, and quirks of its own.
One of the long-running truisms of Eurovision is that juries and audiences tend to favor different kinds of songs. Conventional wisdom says that juries like serious songs that demonstrate artistic virtuosity and range, while audiences like wacky stage hijinks, fun gimmicks, and a danceable beat. Neither assumption is entirely borne out by the voting results, but Eurovision acts often try to court one set of votes or the other. The way points are divided often means that a song that would have won on the strength of audience votes doesn’t win because the juries favor something else, sometimes to ire of some fans who feel their favorite was cheated.
Finland has traditionally done quite poorly in Eurovision. The country has only one win to its credit, 2006, when the monster metal band Lordi unexpectedly pulled off a win in what is seen as the audience rebelling against a contest they felt had grown stale with too much bland, predictable pop music.
Finland has become a semi-reliable source of audaciously weird contributions to Eurovision, most of which fall absolutely flat in the voting results, but which appeal to some parts of the audience by standing out against a background of highly-polished pop.
Sweden, on the other hand, is a Eurovision powerhouse, with a current total of seven wins to its credit. Highly-polished pop is Sweden’s Eurovision bread and butter, and they pull it off better than most other countries, earning frequent recognition from juries. Sweden is home to a major pop music industry, and Swedish composers, lyricists, and choreographers are frequently found working on other countries’ Eurovision entries.
Recent Eurovision history
With the stage set, we turn to the recent history of the Eurovision Song Contest to see how these deeply-rooted forces have played out to lead us to this year.
In 2012, the Eurovision Song Contest was hosted in Azerbaijan and won by the Swedish singer Loreen with her song Euphoria. While Euphoria leaned a little to the weird side for Sweden, it was still highly produced and sung in English, making it easy for an international audience to follow. Euphoria swept both the audience and the juries.
Sweden took home the trophy again just three years later in 2015, when Austria was hosting. The singer Måns Zelmerlöw won with his song Heroes. Like the usual Swedish entry, Heroes was an immaculate pop anthem with a clever stage show, but it caught the heart of Europe. While Italy and Russia did better in the audience vote, Heroes soared with the juries, and Måns’s telegenic charisma won over even those fans who didn’t place Sweden first.
The next year, 2016, Sweden hosted the contest. Måns returned to the stage not just as a performer but as co-host of the festivities along with comedian Petra Mede. The 2016 show was carried off brilliantly and established Måns as not just a beloved past winner but one of the contemporary faces of the contest. He reappeared in several following contests as part of the general entertainment and the interval acts that fill up time while votes are counted. (2016 also gave us Peace Peace, Love Love, a loving parody of the contest itself, performed by Petra and Måns.)
In the following years, Finland and Sweden continued their usual patterns. Swedish songs routinely scored well with juries, and Finland’s songs occasionally excited some fans while mostly ending up near the bottom of the vote tallies. Then came Käärijä.
Finland chooses its Eurovision act with a televised national contest called Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu (New Music Contest, abbreviated UMK). In 2023, a young Finnish rapper/singer known as Käärijä had a runaway victory at UMK with his song Cha Cha Cha and quickly became a sensation among Eurovision fans. Cha Cha Cha was a challenging song: unabashedly weird, sung in Finnish rather than internationally-friendly English, and reflecting in complicated ways on Finnish alcohol and dance culture, but something about it spoke to a wide and adoring audience in Europe.
Sweden selects its competitor with Melodifestivalen (Melody Festival, casually known as Melfest or Mello), a multi-week tournament of songs which finally crowns a winner after several rounds. In 2023, Loreen returned to Eurovision by winning Melfest with Tattoo, a smooth jury-pleasing vocal performance.
Going into Eurovision 2023 (hosted in the United Kingdom on behalf of Ukraine), Finland was in the strange position of audience favorite. The outpouring of fan love for Käärijä and Cha Cha Cha was unheard-of in Finland’s Eurovision history. It quickly became clear that Tattoo was also gathering momentum. In the final voting tally, Finland came out way ahead with the audience, but the juries showed Finland much less love and delivered the victory to Sweden.
The 2023 contest felt like an encapsulation of the Finland-Sweden relationship: Finland the scrappy, weird underdog went up against Sweden the polished, practiced former winner, and the juries swung for Sweden. In the days after the contest there was a lot of resentment from Eurovision fans who felt the juries had cheated Käärijä of a win and the audience of their favorite. Finns felt deflated, and losing to Sweden rankled especially hard. Unkind things were said. In time, tempers cooled, and Finns and Swedes got back to the usual routine of quiet mutual disdain.
The 2024 contest, hosted again by Sweden, did what it could to soothe tempers. The Swedish hosts (Petra Mede again and actress Malin Åkerman) had plenty of self-deprecating jokes about Sweden’s Eurovision obsession, and Käärijä himself performed in one interval act.
It was a turbulent contest, however. Protesters demonstrated against Israel’s participation, and there were rumors about the Israeli delegation at the contest harassing other performers. The biggest cause of discontent, however, was when the Dutch performer, Joost Klein, an audience favorite and one of the leading contenders for victory, was suddenly booted from the contest after an altercation with a camera operator. The details of the incident are murky, but it was widely seen as an overreaction by Eurovision’s governing body. The live audience at the event was vocal with its displeasure, and in the aftermath many Finns enjoyed some schadenfreude at Sweden’s expense.
When do we get to the sauna brothers?
We’re almost there! I promise!
Finally we come to 2025. This year, Finland selected Erika Vikman’s Ich komme (I’m coming) to represent the country. Ich komme is a pumping, upbeat song celebrating a woman’s sexual desire. Sexiness is no stranger to the Eurovision stage, but it traditionally caters to the male gaze. Ich komme, though plenty sexy, is very clear in being about a woman’s own joy in her body and does it without disparaging men, either, a novelty for Eurovision. After UMK, Ich komme gathered some positive buzz, and, while probably not a winner, looks like it may do well at the contest.
And then came this year’s Melfest. As usual, it was a smörgåsbord of well-known Swedish pop music talent, but the star attraction was the return of Måns Zelmerlöw. Måns competed with Revolution, another highly-polished pop anthem in the same spirit as his winning Heroes.
Other great names in Swedish music filled the roster, including John Lundvik, a former Eurovision contestant who came close to winning in 2019. And then there was KAJ.
KAJ is a Finnish comedy group made up of three Swedish-speaking Finns from one of the smaller municipalities on Finland’s west coast. The group takes its name from the first letters of its performers’ names: Kevin, Axel, and Jakob. Although they were locally popular, they were not well known even on the national stage, and were practically unheard-of outside of Finland. KAJ was invited to join Melfest by one of the festival’s producers, and the trio figured it might be a good way to increase their name recognition and maybe score a few more gigs in Sweden but without much hope of anything more. KAJ joined the contest with Bara bada bastu (Just having a sauna), a light-hearted but sincere tribute to the joys of relaxing in sauna after a long day, performed in their own regional dialect of Finland Swedish. KAJ and Måns went up against each other in one of the last rounds of the competition and both passed through to the final.
KAJ stood out from the other performers in the final. Surrounded by media-sexy pop stars and their slickly-produced English-language international hits, the performers in KAJ were self-consciously nerdy, unfashionably authentic, and the only contestants so gauche, so outré, so utterly unsophisticated as to show up to the Swedish song-selection contest and sing in Swedish! Yet the audience loved them! When the votes were counted (Melfest uses a voting system similar to Eurovision’s), it came down to KAJ and Måns. It felt like Käärijä and Loreen all over again: the weird, provincial Finnish nobodies singing a niche but heartfelt little song in their own language up against Eurovision royalty with a whole national pop music industry behind him belting out a focus-group-perfect anthem in English.
And then the impossible happened: KAJ won! The juries broke just barely in Måns’s favor, but the Swedish audience went for KAJ by a million votes, giving KAJ the most audience votes in Melfest history! In this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, Sweden will be represented by a little-known humor group from Finland!
(Måns was less than gracious about his loss. One might have forgiven him for a few unguarded comments in the heat of emotion after a tense contest, but in the weeks since the Melfest final Måns’s wife has announced a divorce with allegations of abuse and drug use that have tarnished Måns’s reputation. Many Swedes are relieved that he will not be representing them on the international stage, especially not with the bitter aftertaste of 2024’s contest.)
The effects of the win have been remarkable to witness. Coming after the rancor of 2023 and chaos of 2024, Swedes and Finns are finding a new spirit of Eurovision togetherness. KAJ’s win has gone some way to patch over old resentments and break down timeworn stereotypes. It has also brought some international recognition to the little-known Swedish-speaking minority in Finland.
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest will be held in Switzerland in the middle of May. We will see what the rest of Europe makes of Ich komme and Bara bada bastu. At this moment, the boys in the sauna are running strong for the top spot, and if they win, then for once Finns will be just as happy for Sweden’s victory as the Swedes are.
An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.
Kadri Liik shared on Twitter some of her family history of using mines to dye fabric for colorful folk skirts in western Estonia in 1930s.
Strictly speaking, of course, it’s not mines themselves that were used in dyeing, but the picric acid in them. Russian World War I battleship Slava sank in 1917 between Muhu island and mainland Estonia, only 12 years after putting to sea.
Estonians scrapped the ship in the early 1930s. During that process, picric acid was extracted and put to use. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, picric acid was first used in dyeing in 1849, initially of silk. In Muhu, it was apparently used with wool.
The bright yellow derived from picric acid was locally known as mine yellow (miinikollane). Below is the Muhu skirt made from scratch by Liik’s grandmother or great aunt in 1930s:
Apparently, Muhu skirts enjoyed such popularity that older women might be doing their everyday chores in them as late as the 1960s.
It’s quite striking, isn’t it? It seems that some of these traditional patterns survive, either in traditionally woven textiles or as prints on modern fabrics, which is fabulous. I’m not sure I’d like to know exactly how the picric was extracted in the 30s, though…!
Did you know that Sweden used to be a major power in northern Europe? A major power as in having land holdings pretty much all around the Baltic Sea and even beyond? If I hadn’t learned that at school, I probably wouldn’t know; it’s really not talked about much these days.
Anyway. One fascinating detail from my classes that has stayed with me is the large riksdaler plate money (Swedish: plåtmynt). They were circulated in the 17th to 18th centuries to reduce the costs of minting coins and ease the transportation of money.
The riksdaler could be quite large. For example, according to my old history book, the 1644 coin measured 20 x 70 cm (approximately 8″ x 27″) and weighed 19,7 kg (approx. 43-44 lbs). The one pictured below is from 1744 and obviously not nearly as big as that.
What if in your secondary fantasy world, instead of chests of thousands of coins, your intrepid adventurers had to deal with large metal sheet money, a dozen or so to a chest? Wouldn’t that be an interesting worldbuilding detail?
Image: Anja Laurila et al. Historia kurssi III. Porvoo: WSOY, 1990, p. 73.
History for Writers is a weekly feature which looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write.
The Faroe Islands—an autonomous region of Denmark—has built bridges and tunnels before to connect the numerous islands or islets and its 50,000-some residents. Never before, however, have they dug an undersea tunnel as deep or as long as the brand-new Eysturoyartunnilin, nor built an undersea roundabout.
The roundabout is part of a tunnel measuring about 11 km (6.8 miles), the third sub-sea tunnel in the islands. It connects the islands of Streymoy and Eysturoy, and reaches at its deepest 187 meters (roughly 200 yards) below sea level. At this writing the tunnel’s been in use for about a month.
Oh, my goodness. It’s obviously not a solution that suits every location, and I assume the cost plus know-how involved can also be a deterrent, but what a feat of engineering and vision it is. This is yet another reason why it’s (pandemic aside) exciting to be living now!
In the village of Zalipie in southern Poland, some blossoms never stop blooming: they’re painted. Not just on the walls inside or outside, but on ceilings, beams, stoves, sheds, dog houses, wells, buckets, paved ground, and bridges.
No one apparently knows exactly how the flower-painting tradition came to be. Common features of the origin stories involve covering up stains, or simply perking up the homes, or uplifting people’s mood following World War II.
Regardless of the custom’s origins, it’s a fascinating feature of village life. These kinds of details would make spec fic stories even more alive, wouldn’t you say?
Today is the premier for the animated sequel Frozen II here in the U.S. Unlike most Di$ney princess movies*, I will be seeing this one during its theatrical release for a particular reason.
In the story, Anna and Elsa et al. travel to the north and meet a people resembling the Sámi. For their research and inspiration, the Walt Disney Animation Studios not only talked with Sámi people but actually signed an agreement with the Sámi to do it in a respectful, collaborative way.
The Sámi are the only indigenous people within the European Union area. They currently live in the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia.
Disney even invited some members of the Sámi Parliaments to U.S. to see the movie at the world premier, meet some of the makers, and tour the animation studio.
The most exciting part for my linguist brain is that the studio will record and release a version dubbed in Northern Sámi, the largest of the Sámi languages. The voice actors are drawn mainly from Sweden and Norway, among them the acclaimed Sámi musician Mari Boine, but also one Finn. (Yay!)
While it’s true they aren’t very numerous these days (partly thanks to racial, linguistic, and cultural discrimination), the Sámi do exist and do have a living culture. (Just check out the music scene for one incredibly vibrant aspect—yoik comes almost in all styles now!) I grew up two hours south of the Arctic Circle, and the Sámi were my classmates, neighbors, and teachers. For me it’s delightful that Disney took the time to research, listen, and respectfully pay homage to people I grew up with.
Undoubtedly I will also enjoy scenery that reminds me of trips to Lapland even if the first reports say the northern mountains look too young and rugged to be based on the fells on the Finnish side of the border. 🙂
*) The only other exception is Moana, which was also produced in cooperation with indigenous peoples.
Images: Per-Olof Nutti, Aili Keskitalo, Åsa Larsson Blind, and Tiina Sanila-Aikio with their daughters at the world premier of Frozen II by Siv Eli Vuolab / Sámediggi via Yle. Three members of the northern herder tribe from Frozen II via Yle. View overlooking a northern valley from Frozen IIvia Yle.
In Live and Active Cultures we talk about cultures and cultural differences.
After the Finnish centennial in 2017, I’ve been reading outside my usual periods of Finnish history, including on the Finnish Winter War (1939-1940, for 105 days against the USSR).
It’s easy for a modern Finn—at least this modern Finn—to get tired of reading endless takes, almost exclusively by foreigners, condemning the horribleness of the Finnish winter. Like in this excerpt from a book on the Winter War:
“One of the main factors that enabled the Finns to destroy forces much larger than their own was surely rooted in the differing psychologies of the men engaged on either side. To the Finnish soldier, the cold, the snow, the forest, the long hours of darkness were all factors that could be turned to his advantage. To say that the Finns were on intimate terms with winter is to voice an understatement. In Finland winter is the fact of life, and all else—the economy, the culture, the national psychology—is colored by, or derived from, that single overriding reality. The relationship between the Finns and winter constitutes something of a contradiction. On the one hand, winter makes life harsh and lonely and something crude. It is this aspect of living with winter, the cumulative effect of endless subarctic nights, the unearthly silences of the winter landscape, the harsh and marginal quality of rural life, that imparts to the Finnish character that dour and brooding quality that is so hard for foreigners to penetrate.”
– William Trotter, A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 [original emphasis]
It is true that we stayed poor quite long and urbanised quite fast, pretty much during my parents’ generation, so it’s easy for me to lose perspective. Even as late as 1950s (I believe) it wasn’t unheard of for more remote farms not to have electricity. And our winters are undoubtedly long and dark compared to even central Europe, not to mention the Mediterranean and further south.
What bugs me, though, is that people seem to expect conditions like Siberia or Greenland. Hate to disappoint you, but our climate is greatly tempered by the Gulf stream and it isn’t that different from, say, New England. Another detail I’d like foreigners to really learn is that less than half of the country is arctic, and that means the rest is not. The southern coast is, in fact, part of the temperate broadleaf forest zone which covers most of central Europe, Britain, southern Scandinavia, and southern Russia.
I do grant that the Finnish character hasn’t caught up with the technological development, at least not yet: in general terms, we still tend towards melancholy despite now having world-class cities, transportation, and tech.
Trotter, William R. A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, p. 144.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
(This post is mostly a Note to Self—I don’t want to forget about the study below—but if other people are interested, that’s great.)
The majority of languages spoken in North Eurasia belong to three language families—Turkic, Indo-European, and Uralic. My native language Finnish is a part of the Uralic languages; the main branches of the family are the Finno-Ugric and the Samoyed.
While there’s rough agreement over where and how Uralic languages developed and spread, and over what types of material cultures were found in the corresponding areas, no-one’s done comprehensive studies on the genetic history of Uralic-speaking peoples before.
This interdisciplinary study, lead by Kristiina Tambets from the University of Tartu, Estonia, compared genome-wide genetic variation of nearly all extant Uralic-speaking populations from Europe and Siberia.
“The genetic origins of Uralic speakers from across a vast territory in the temperate zone of North Eurasia have remained elusive. Previous studies have shown contrasting proportions of Eastern and Western Eurasian ancestry in their mitochondrial and Y chromosomal gene pools. While the maternal lineages reflect by and large the geographic background of a given Uralic- speaking population, the frequency of Y chromosomes of Eastern Eurasian origin is distinctively high among European Uralic speakers. The autosomal variation of Uralic speakers, however, has not yet been studied comprehensively. […]
“Here, we present a genome-wide analysis of 15 Uralic-speaking populations which cover all main groups of the linguistic family. We show that contemporary Uralic speakers are genetically very similar to their local geographical neighbours. However, when studying relationships among geographically distant populations, we find that most of the Uralic speakers and some of their neighbours share a genetic component of possibly Siberian origin. Additionally, we show that most Uralic speakers share significantly more genomic segments identity-by-descent with each other than with geographically equidistant speakers of other languages. We find that correlated genome-wide genetic and lexical distances among Uralic speakers suggest co- dispersion of genes and languages. Yet, we do not find long-range genetic ties between Estonians and Hungarians with their linguistic sisters that would distinguish them from their non-Uralic-speaking neighbours.”
And the conclusion:
“Here, we present for the first time the comparison of genome-wide genetic variation of nearly all extant Uralic-speaking populations from Europe and Siberia. We show that (1) the Uralic speakers are genetically most similar to their geographical neighbours; (2) nevertheless, most Uralic speakers along with some of their geographic neighbours share a distinct ancestry component of likely Siberian origin. Furthermore, (3) most geographically distant Uralic speaking populations share more genomic IBD segments with each other than with equidistant populations speaking other languages and (4) there is a positive correlation between linguistic and genetic data of the Uralic speakers. This suggests that the spread of the Uralic languages was at least to some degree associated with movement of people. Moreover, the discovery of the Siberian component shows that the three known major components of genetic diversity in Europe (European hunter-gatherers, early Neolithic farmers and the Early Bronze Age steppe people) are not enough to explain the extant genetic diversity in (northeast) Europe.”
I find the question of which material cultures may have spread together with which languages absolutely fascinating. Having my own small language / culture be a part of a larger study like this makes it even more special.
I was also surprised to learn that only three Uralic languages—Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—are not listed as endangered in the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. (I did know that several of the tiniest ones like Mari or the Permic languages have been endangered for decades, but I had thought that some of the Samoyed or Ugric languages had more speakers than that.)
While I doubt these three will go extinct very soon, there’s pressure at least in Finland to adopt more and more loanwords from English. Then again, we three may end up being rather rare, all in all, and I’m not quite sure whether to be alarmed over our potential disappearance or proud of our preciousness—or both.
Tambets, Kristiina et al. 2018. “Genes reveal traces of common recent demographic history for most of the Uralic-speaking populations”. Genome Biology 19:139. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-018-1522-1. The article is openly accessible (CC BY 4.0).
Co-Geeking 
You must be logged in to post a comment.