this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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I was recently talking with a Russian friend of mine, and he told me that Finland is actually Slavic. His reasoning was that Russia and Finland share a long border and a lot of history

Please don't burn me at the stake I'm just the messenger D:

I know next to nothing about this and just wanted to see if there was any truth to what he said from a cultural or historical standpoint

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[–] HidingInMyBunker@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

Definitely not Slavic, but I would say there is a lot of Russian influence depending on the location. Western Finland is more Swedish influenced while Eastern Finland is more Russian influenced. The cultural and linguistic divide is not that large today between the western and eastern parts due to homogenization. I do feel that the Swedish influence is overemphasized so we can happily stand in the Nordic camp. Overall Russian influence is smaller than historically if you look at something like toponyms (Turku, Kuopio) though the latter comes from personal name, loaned vocabulary includes religious, technical, material and dietary terms to list a few. There is little orthodoxy in Finland today and even that is mainly an East Karelian thing. Plenty of cultural exchange has happened between the Baltic Finnic peoples and the neighboring Slavs, mainly Northern Russians and what are now Pomors. Finland overall does not contain that much influence from its eastern neighbor. Modern Finland, its culture, language and ethnogenesis have been largely composed in the past two centuries. As everyone else has pointed out, Finnish is not related to its neighboring Indo-European languages, though consist many loan words mainly from Proto-Germanic and Baltic. Also a Saamic substrate, but I am not really knowledgeable in the topic.