Under Swedish rule (pre-1809), the Finnish language had little or no social status (upward mobility often went together with Swedification), but was used for pastoral purposes in the Lutheran state Church, taught to trainee pastors, and studied philologically by Swedish intellectuals and antiquaries based in the Grand Duchy (Henrik Gabriel Porthan, De poesi fennica, 1766-78; Gustaf Renvall, De orthoepia et orthographia linguae fennicae, 1810-11). It had long been recognized that Finnish was unrelated to Russian or Swedish, but some with Estonian and various other minor languages in the Russian Empire; by the end of the 18th century, a family resemblance with Hungarian was observed. As the Indo-European linguistic paradigm emerged, Finnish was classified outside that linguistic family as a “Finno-Ugric” language. This meant that linguistic reflection on Finish identity from the beginning had an ethnographic component and that the non-Indo-European classification of Finnish also implied a non-European ethnic descent for the nation.

Under Russian rule, the national status of Finnish rose while its scholarly study came to be conducted in a more systematic manner. The bilingual Swedish-Finnish Matthias Alexander Castrén, initially trained as a classicist, conducted linguistic studies in the late 1830s, undertaking field trips among the Saami and in Karelia in 1839, and in 1841-44 (together with Lönnrot) in the regions north-east of the Ural Mountains. His Elementa grammatices Syrjaenae and Elementa grammatices Tscheremissae appeared in 1844. A Siberian field trip in 1845-48 at the behest of the Imperial Academy in St Petersburg (which was chaired by his fellow-Finn Sjögren) resulted in Versuch einer ostjakischen Sprachlehre nebst kurzem Wörterverzeichnis (1849) and De affixis personalibus linguarum Altaicarum (1850); this last work was delivered as his disputation for a newly-established chair of Finnish history at the University of Helsinki, to which he was appointed in due course. Castrén’s work, together with that of his associate Franz Anton Schiefner (1817–1879), consolidated notions of a Finno-Ugric language family, with Finnish as its north-westernmost outlier.

Around this time the political position of Finnish was fraught. The language was embattled under Russian conservatism but gaining an increasingly pronounced national-symbolical cultural prestige, thanks in no small part to the publication of Lönnrot’s Kalevala. (Both Castrén and Schiefner translated the Kalevala: Castrén into Swedish, Schiefner into German, helping it to achieve international fame as Finland’s “national epic”.)

A “Fennoman” party used Finnish as the badge of the Grand Duchy’s separate identity under Russian imperial rule, over against the region’s (or their own familial or personal) Swedish-speaking antecedents. Many Fennomans Fennicized their given or family names, with a high point in the centenary commemorations of the birth of the Fennoman leader Snellman in 1906. The Fennoman politician Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen was born Zacharias Forsman; the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela was originally called Axel Gallén.

Others, like the poet Runeberg and the historian Topelius, while committed to a Finnish territorial identity, maintained their Swedish language and cherished their Swedish ties. The more strenuous opponents of the Fennoman agenda were known as the “Svecomans”, many of whom were motivated by a sense of cultural and ethnic superiority. The Helsinki professor Axel Olof Freudenthal (1836–1911), editor of the journal Wikingen (“The Viking”, 1870-74) and founder of the Society for Swedish Literature in Finland (1885), was among those who couched these ideas in terms of ethnic-racial supremacism: Finnish was rejected as a language and ethnicity associated with inferior and underdeveloped Siberian tundra-dwellers. Hungarian Turanists and Russian Slavophiles used similar denigrations of the Finnish ethnicity; but conversely, in neighbouring Estonia, the linguistic relatedness of Finnish was embraced enthusiastically, the high standard of Finnish literacy was seen as an ideal to emulate, and the Kalevala was admired as a shining example of the transmutation of oral song into a national epic.

Finnish-Swedish tensions dominated cultural and political life in Finland, even after Alexander II recognized Finnish as an official language (1863); as a result, many Fennomans became pro-tsarist, something that only changed during the increasingly intolerant Russification drive of the period 1881-1910. While common resistance against the tightening grip of Russian autocracy took primacy in the country’s political struggle in the run-up to independence, the country’s bilingualism has remained a fact of life, Finnish now occupying the numerically and symbolically dominant position.