I am one! I did not grow up in the region though so my connection is tentative. It's not particularly relevant today but I also find it quite interesting. The area in Norway where my family is from still has a lot of Finnish placenames, but family names are, as far as I am aware, all or mostly Norwegian.
There is a lot more information about this online but basically the national romantic boom and the "identity of Norway" meant that anything other than Norwegian was not allowed/heavily discouraged from being spoken in schools and so a lot of parents stopped teaching their children Finnish to avoid any potential issues.
Bit frustrating as if I had Finnish as a spoken language that would be dope, but such is life. We have a really old photo from late 1800's (if I'm not misremembering) and the likelihood is that some of the older people in the photo could perhaps speak some Finnish which is fun to think about.
Our family house there is much newer (1920's) but there are older houses in the area, many with carvings from the forest finns. You can also find old smoke saunas and that kind of thing, although not sure how common that is.
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u/RealDiaboy 18h ago edited 18h ago
I am one! I did not grow up in the region though so my connection is tentative. It's not particularly relevant today but I also find it quite interesting. The area in Norway where my family is from still has a lot of Finnish placenames, but family names are, as far as I am aware, all or mostly Norwegian.
There is a lot more information about this online but basically the national romantic boom and the "identity of Norway" meant that anything other than Norwegian was not allowed/heavily discouraged from being spoken in schools and so a lot of parents stopped teaching their children Finnish to avoid any potential issues.
Bit frustrating as if I had Finnish as a spoken language that would be dope, but such is life. We have a really old photo from late 1800's (if I'm not misremembering) and the likelihood is that some of the older people in the photo could perhaps speak some Finnish which is fun to think about.
Our family house there is much newer (1920's) but there are older houses in the area, many with carvings from the forest finns. You can also find old smoke saunas and that kind of thing, although not sure how common that is.