As research for my novel-in-progress, I'm reading an excellent article on the history of publishing. In it, I found the following paragraph, which I found interesting enough to post here: Early publishing had a profound effect on national languages and literatures—it began at once to create, standardize, and preserve them. Caxton, in the preface to his translation of the Aeneid, after telling a story of confused dialects, ended up “Lo! what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren?” By choosing words “understood of common people” and by printing all he could of English literature, he steered the English language along its main line of development. The early printing of great vernacular works, such as those of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, or a vernacular Bible, such as that of Luther in Germany, gave many languages their standard modern form. The French language owes much to the early printer-publisher Robert Estienne, who is known not only for his typographical innovations of the 1530s but also for his dictionaries. His work in the latter field caused him to be known as the father of French lexicography. Up to 1500, about three-quarters of all printing was in Latin, but thereafter that proportion steadily declined as books appeared in the vernacular and reached an ever-widening public.
In Finland all writing was first in Swedish. They ruled our country. When writing in Finnish started there was a need to standardise it. They had to choose which dialect would be the base of written Finnish. They chose south and west dialects. And that is why our beautiful and easy-to-learn language is not more complicated and sounds so similar with other western languages.
I have a Finnish-American friend who, in addition to Finnish and English, speaks fluent Swedish. I'm led to understand that this is common there.
