Introduction

2026-06-22T12:43:42.410767368+0300

2026-06-22

I was born in the United States, grew up there, went to college there, and got a job there.

Then, in 2016, I applied for a Uralic linguistics Master's program in Turku, Finland. I had wanted to learn more Finnish and more linguistics since finishing undergrad, and was interested in pursuing something more academic than the software job I had at the time, so in the fall of that year I moved to Turku.

At the time, I didn't realize how prescient this would sound a decade later, nor did I know — at least not beyond a vague suspicion — that I would still be here, engaged to a Finn and viewing Finland as home and the United States as the town I grew up in.

On first glance, the United States and Finland have a certain amount in common, insofar as both are rich Western countries who have until recently seen each other as, if not technically allies until Finland joined NATO, at least friendly sort-of neighbors.

Once you scratch the surface, however, you run headalong into a slew of cultural and societal differences that are easy to miss as a tourist or international student, and that even long-term residents may only be passingly familiar with. I have held Finnish citizenship since late 2023, and nevertheless would not say I truly began to appreciate Finnish culture until I moved in with my Finnish now-fiancée in early 2025. I have been meaning to start a blog like this since a co-worker first suggested it several years ago.

Finnish and American cultural differences go much deeper than attitudes towards public healthcare and guns, although those are definitely present and may be worth discussing at some point. Finnish and American ideas of what common food items should be like are radically different. Finnish Christmas is not American Christmas, even though both are rooted in the same religious concept and share the same cast of main characters. Apartments and houses are simply laid out differently, even after you account for variations in regulatory practice. There are subtle differences in naming practices well beyond certain names "looking Finnish" or "looking American".

Linguistically, English and Finnish are radically different languages, although English loanwords abound in modern spoken Finnish, and certain syntactic elements of Finnish seem earily familiar to English speakers used to studying Romance languages. A highly agglutinative, postpositional language has a certain learning curve for anglophones, but intending Finnish learners (and Finns studying English) should not be daunted by the novelty of the other's language — everything makes sense once you break it down, and the breaking down is a lot more straightforward in Finnish than in languages Americans often think of as "easy".

I will be discussing all of these things here, in time, to various levels of depth. Some posts will be about things that I have been thinking about for more than a decade; others will be inspired by things that happen in my daily life. Posts are unlikely to follow any particular schedule, at least not at first, but they will be shared via RSS and announced on social media (mostly Mastodon). The entire blog, like anything I write, will be AI-free (including stock images, to the best of my ability).

Enjoy!

Under Sustained Finnish Influence

Introduction