The Duchy of Finland was taken from Sweden by Russia in the Napoleonic era.

The predominantly Finnish duchy with a predominantly Swedish aristocracy

was ruled over by a Russian emperor for the next century.

But Finland maintained its separate identity,

and in the wake of the October Revolution won its independence, only to suffer its own

version of a red and white civil war. Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Episode 181, 1919, Finland.

This is the sixth episode of our 1919 world tour, and today we'll be talking about

Finland. This seems like a logical transition since we just finished Poland, and Finland,

like Poland, want its independence during the chaos that followed the Great War in the East.

And in keeping with the theme, next week we'll look at the Baltic states,

the three small nations on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, that also won their freedom

at this same time.

The first humans settled the region we now call Finland over 10,000 years ago,

after the glaciers that covered all of Scandinavia retreated at the end of the most recent Ice Age.

The Finnish language is interesting because it's part of the Uralic group of languages and is not an Indo-European tongue.

The fact that Finnish is not Indo-European makes it challenging to learn,

for those of us who do speak Indo-European languages.

In our time, there are 38 languages that are part of the Uralic group,

most of which are spoken by peoples native to the far north of Europe and Asia.

Three languages in this group are official languages of sovereign nations, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian.

The question of whether the people living in Finland have always spoken a urologic language

or whether we should posit a pre-existing Indo-European population with urologic-speaking peoples

...