April 9 – Mikael Agricola Day / Finnish Language Day – in Finland, of course!

In addition to “merely” inventing a written language and doing a whole lot of translation, Agricola was in favor of bringing the Protestant Reformation to Finland, and he wrote some of his opinions as introductions in his prayer books.

Sadly, Agricola died suddenly at age 47 while he was returning from a trip to Russia, where he helped negotiate a peace treaty. It is the day that he died, April 9, 1557, that is commemorated as Finnish Language Day.

There are so many exasperated sounding memes about the difficulty of the Finnish language on the internet. But please remember that Mikael Agricola did not invent the Finnish language – he invented how to WRITE the Finnish language.

Agricola invented written Finnish? Wow!

Agricola wanted every Finn to be able to read religious books, especially the Bible, for themselves. That is why he worked to invent a way in which the sounds of Finnish could map onto a modified Roman alphabet (basically the same alphabet we English-speakers use).

However, with upper class children still being educated in Swedish, written Finnish didn’t blossom until the 1800s. At that time, people began to feel patriotic about all things Finnish, and a man named Elias Lönnrot (who was, coincidentally, born on the same day that Mikael Agricola died, but 245 years later!) collected Finnish folk tales and published them in Finnish.

Finally, in 1892, the Finnish language gained equal status with Swedish in Finland.

Did anyone else ever invent a written language?

Norwegian is fairly similar to Danish and Swedish, and the people of Norway didn’t have a written form of their own language until about 150 years ago, because those who were literate used Danish. In the last century and a half, however, two different written Norwegian languages developed! Both are official languages, both are used in government, schools, churches, newspapers, and magazines. Students learn both (some learn Bokmal as their primary and Nynorsk as their secondary written languages, and others vice versa).

Cherokee – Sequoyah’s syllabary

In 1821, Sequoyah (AKA Ssiquoya, Se-quo-ya, George Gist, or Guess) completed 12 years of work on the creation of a writing system for the Cherokee language. This is considered the only time in history that an illiterate member of a culture that had no written language has independently created an effective writing system. (Sequoyah had seen English and some other written languages but didn’t know how to read those languages. He used many Roman, Cyrillic, and Greek letters, and Arabic numerals, for his written language—but in his system the symbols have no connection to the sounds or names of those letters and numerals in their original languages.)

Sequoyah created a syllabary of 86 symbols that stood for different Cherokee syllables. If we were producing a syllabary for English, we could use “>” for ba, “<” for ca, and “#” for da, for example. We would need a lot of different symbols for all the syllables English-speakers use!

Unlike Agricola’s invention, written Cherokee caught on right away. Within just four years, the Cherokee Nation officially adopted the writing system, a newspaper sprang up two years after that, and the literacy rate of the Cherokee soon outstripped that of their white American settler neighbors.

Navajo – Vowel Intonations and Code Talkers

The ancient Sumerians developed one of the earliest forms of writing. Read about it here.

Do you want to try some Finnish food? How about sautéed reindeer, salmon soup, and blood pancakes? Or…maybe you’d like a nice Finnish trifle or cinnamon bun.

There are Finnish nursery rhymes and lyrics to Finnish kids’ songs on Mama Lisa’s website, and the flag and map of Finland on the Enchanted Learning website.