The cornerstone of unity

38 THE FINNO-UGRIAN SOCIETY
In the beginning, before the concept of Finnishness existed, there was Finno-Ugrianism. It was known that the 
Finnish language was unrelated to Hebrew or Greek, the language of antiquity and the Bible. It was assumed 
that languages that were spoken in northern Eurasia and the people who lived there would be able to reveal 
undocumented history from the ancient past, so passionate information-seekers and courageous travelers were 
required and their mission lasted several generations. 
The Finno-Ugrian Society was founded in 1883 to promote the study of the language, culture and history of 
the Ugric and Altaic people. Dozens of scholarships have been awarded over the years to enable the collection 
of a wealth of material on Finno-Ugrianism from around the Ural mountains and the so-called Altaic languages 
from the land that lies between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. The society has published hundreds of 
books, reports, analyses and collections of material. This mass of information means that Finno-Ugrianism has 
been mapped far more concretely than was the case when the society was founded, but in fact new studies are 
still being produced, and no final answer has yet been produced to the question of Finno-Ugrianism. The 

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ongoing question is still two the languages are related and how many thousand years are needed to explain the 
diversity between them. 
The area under study has from the very beginning been understood to be the areas where Uralic and Altaic 
languages are spoken, which consists of dozens of different kinds of ethnic communities who had several 
different ways of interpreting the mundane and the sacred. When large-scale field trips were undertaken, Finno-
Ugric communities generally used the same language they had inherited from their ancestors, and their culture 
had been handed down in the same fashion as they in turn passed their legacy to their descendants. This was 
interrupted however by the Russian revolution, Stalin’s purges, the Second World War and urbanization. 
Scandinavian Sámi people, Mordvin, Cheremis (Mari), Votjak (Urdmurt), Ostyak (Khanty) and Vogul (Mantsy) 
and different kinds of Samoyedic populations all received a researcher, aided by a scholarship, from the Finno-
Ugrian Society, as did Mongols who spoke Altaic languages. 
Heikki Paasonen’s Mordvin material and Artturi Kannisto’s Mantsy collections were edited over the next 100 
years until they were ready for publication. G.J. Ramstedt, who studied Mongols, was the unluckiest of the large 
group who received a scholarship from the society: his first large collection of material was stolen. He returned to 
Finland almost empty-handed but he pulled himself together and returned to the field, going even further east, as 
far as Japan and Korea. Ramstedt wrote the first and for a long time the only English-language book on the 
Korean language which was published in 1939. When the Korean War began, the U.S. Army bought the entire 
stock. 
The most famous recipient of the stipend was C.G. Mannerheim, who made his famous trip, which was also 
designed to enable the collection of military intelligence, in 1906
–08. To disguise the true reason for his trip, he 
collected a lot of valuable ethnographic material and above all photographed life in western and northern China, 
traveling by horse through all the four seasons. Mannerheim’s photographic negatives have survived in good 
enough condition to be converted into digital form, and they are highly valued in modern-day China for their 
authenticity. 
Many of the Finno-Ugrian Society researchers who were granted scholarships at the end of the 19th century 
and beginning of the 20th century predicted perceived an ongoing change in language and predicted that the 
language would die and be superseded in most cases by Russian. In many cases this has come to pass and 
Finno-Ugricness in the 21st century is characterised by old, autoch
thonous linguistic societies’ minority status, 
and linguistic rights are usually lacking or completely absent. The dictionaries that the society released on the 
Liv and Kamasin languages in 1938 and 1944 respectively are already the most important documents on dead 
languages. Subsequent dictionaries on Khanty (1948), Skolt and Skolt Lappish (1958), Carelian (1968
–2005) 
and Mordvin (1990
–1999) are classics in their genre and important sources of the respective languages, 
together with the other materials that were collected. The Finnish etymological dictionary was also published by 
the society in 1955
–1981. 
The Finno-Ugrian Society is still one of the more important international publishers of research in the field, 
and it also serves as a place for researchers to gather. Many Finno-Ugrian communities that speak minority 
languages that aim to develop and research their language have found the society’s publications to be a rich 
source for their cultural inheritance. The strongest tradition is still the holding of the annual general meeting on 
the discipline founder M.A. Castren’s birthday on December 2. This has lasted since 1884. 
Let us then here at the end of the article reveal the truth about the Finno-Ugric linguistic family: it was already 
perceived by Hungarian researchers in the 18th century. The Finno-Ugric llinguistic family is nowadays known 
quite well, but many languages are in worse straits than ever. The research community’s mission continues. 
Riho Gr
ünthal – Professor at Helsinki University
Department of Finno-Ugrian studies