Ice hockey is not usually my thing. However, while at a bar in central Helsinki watching Finland play Canada, I was absorbed by the atmosphere. Ice hockey is one of the most popular sports in the northern European country, and the Finns had high hopes for their team. Their national pride was contagious.
The camera zoomed in on the Finnish players and I saw a word I didn’t recognise splashed across a jersey: ‘SUOMI’. At first I thought it was the player’s name, but then I noticed the same word on every uniform.
“What does ‘Suomi’ mean?” I asked my friend Krista Fransman, a Helsinki local.
“Finland,” she replied. The Finns are not ones for small talk.
“Isn’t Finland ‘Finland’?”
“Not in Finnish,” she chuckled.
Finns refer to themselves and to Finland as ‘Suomi’ (Credit: MARKKU ULANDER/Getty Images)
During the intermission, Fransman explained that the name ‘Finland’ was not Finnish-born. In fact, the original Finnish alphabet didn’t even contain the letter ‘f’, which was introduced to the language through borrowed words. One theory is that the name ‘Finland’ comes from the Old English word finna, a general term once used to describe people from Scandinavia. However, some historians believe its origins are actually Swedish, where the words finlonti and finlandi are believed to have been used as early as the 12th Century to describe the land that is now the south-western part of modern Finland.
Despite having being referred to by some variation of ‘Finland’ since medieval times, the Finns continue as they have for centuries, referring to their country, and themselves, as ‘Suomi’. It made me wonder: where did the name ‘Suomi’ come from, and how does it fit into the modern Finnish identity?
I began my quest at the National Museum of Finland. In 2017, the country celebrated the 100th anniversary of its independence, and the museum’s new permanent exhibition, The Story of Finland, recounts the country’s transition to an autonomous nation.
The National Museum of Helsinki's The Story of Finland exhibit recounts the country’s transition to an autonomous nation (Credit: Ilja Dubovskis/Alamy)
From 1809 to 1917 Finland was a Grand Duchy under the Russian Empire; before that, the territory was under Swedish control for almost 700 years. Between these two northern powers, the land that Finland now occupies was fought over repeatedly; occupied and re-occupied from both sides. The Russian Revolution paved the way for the Finns to declare their independence.
The exhibition shows the young nation’s continued struggle to form a democratic society while, at the same time, attempting to bolster a national identity – one that emphasised openness (in 1906, Finland became the first European country to grant voting rights to all adult citizens). But nowhere did I find any mention of the name ‘Suomi’, or why modern-day Finns still prefer to use it over ‘Finland’.
“There is no certain knowledge about the real origin of the name ‘Suomi’,” said museum curator Satu Frondelius. “One theory is that Suomi comes from word ‘suomaa’ which means ‘swampland’ in Finnish.” She noted that the south-western part of the country is home to numerous lakes, which could have looked like swampland to outsiders. “Another theory is that the word comes from ‘suomu’, which means ‘scale’ [of a fish], suggesting that people in Finland wore clothes made out of fish skins.”
