The only languages close to Finnish are from the countries below it: Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian. But why does it bear almost no similarities with the countries right next to it? Where did Finnish come from?
Short answer: The people who would later become the Finns and Estonians migrated into Europe several thousand years ago from a region far to the east, most likely located around the Ural Mountains. This can be demonstrated by analyzing their languages and determining which sorts of plants, animals, and geographic features the ancestors of the Finnish and Estonian peoples would have been familiar with, and then determining where on a map these things would have existed.
Note that it is demonstrably incorrect that Finnish is what /u/lubutu calls a 'pre-Indo-European language.
To understand where Finnish comes from and how it got there, it's important to look at the history of the language and those of its neighbors. Swedish, a language closely related to Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic, and more distantly to German, English, and Dutch, belongs to a group called the Germanic Languages. This group, in turn, belongs to a much larger family of languages called the Indo-European family.
The Germanic languages are all descended from one common ancestor, known as Proto-Germanic, which was spoken very roughly around 500 BCE and 500 AD. Between these dates, different dialects emerged within Proto-Germanic, and these eventually diverged and became separate languages, which then continued to split up into the languages mentioned above (along with a few others.) Ultimately, many similarities remain between the Germanic languages, even though nobody would call English and German and Norwegian the "same language." Compare the following sentences, in a few Germanic languages.
| English | Dutch | German | Danish | Swedish | Norwegian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What is that? | Wat is dat? | Was ist das? | Hvad er det? | Vad är dat? | Hva er det? |
Even though they're not all the same, the relationship between them is clear. Now let's look at an individual word, comparing it across all these languages.
| English | Dutch | German | Danish | Swedish | Norwegian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | Kat | Katze | Kat | Katt | Katt |
So we can clearly see that all of these languages have a similar word for that thing we call a 'Cat.' All of these words are descended from one word form in Proto-Germanic- for this reason, we call them cognates, and call this grouping of words across related languages a cognate set. And because all six of these words mean 'Cat,' we can very safely assume that the Proto-Germanic word must have meant 'Cat.' And therefore, we can conclude that the Proto-Germanic people knew what cats were.
Now, here's something a little more problematic. Here is another cognate set across the same Germanic languages, this time related to the English word 'Sea.' This time, I've included meanings in the table.
English| Dutch | German | Danish | Swedish | Norwegian ---|---|----|----|----|----|---- Sea | Zee | See | Sø | Sjö | Sjø Sea | Sea |Lake, Sea | Lake, Sea | Lake, Sea | Lake, Sea
Now, the English word 'Sea' refers to a large body of water as something distinct from a lake. But in 2/3 of these languages, this particular word can refer to both seas and lakes. What's more, in Middle English and in Middle Dutch, the words 'Sea' and 'Zee' could be used to refer to lakes as well.
It is possible to reconstruct a Proto-Germanic word which evolved into each of these words in each of these languages. That word is *Saiwaz. When reconstructing the MEANING of this word, however, because most of its modern descendants can refer to both lakes and seas, we must say that originally, it could mean either.
Now, if you are part of a tribe that lives right by the ocean, in a part of the world where there are lakes, you will probably have words to distinguish 'lakes' from 'seas' in your language. But if you live in a part of the world that has only one or the other, you might only need one word for 'large body of water,' since the differences between types of large bodies of water which you probably see very rarely won't be very important to you.
This is a way in which we can use linguistic evidence to figure out where speakers of a proto-language originally lived. We can say that since in Proto-Germanic, there was no major distinction made between 'lakes' and 'seas,' the Proto-Germanic peoples did not live in an environment full of both.
We can apply the same process to other features of the land, like geographical features (for example, does a language distinguish between mountains and hills?) as well as types of plants and animals (can you reconstruct a word in a proto-language for "Fox?" If not, then the speakers of this language probably didn't see foxes very much) to learn about the environments that speakers of these proto-languages lived in.
The reconstruction of the word for 'Sea,', along with many other key terms, coupled with archaeological evidence, points to the Baltic region as the general homeland of the Proto-Germanic peoples.
Now, back to Finnish.
Finnish, along with Estonian, belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. The languages belonging to this family are spread out across northern Eurasia- here is a map. There is a LOT of uncertainty about the 'when' of Proto-Uralic, with estimates for when it was spoken ranging from 7000 to 2000 BCE, but the 'where' of it is slightly less murky. There is no absolute consensus, but most theories include the area around the Ural Mountains, and south of them, around the northern Volga river, as the homeland of the Proto-Uralic peoples. Here is a map of the Ural mountains and here's a map of the Volga river basin
Looking at a map of where the modern-day Uralic languages are spoken, it makes sense to assume that the original homeland of the Uralic peoples was somewhere in between all the places where the Uralic languages survive now.
By comparing cognate sets in daughter languages, we can isolate specific items which the Proto-Uralic people were familiar with. Unfortunately, since the Uralic languages diverged much longer ago than the Germanic languages, it is MUCH harder to find solid cognate sets.
The lexical items that have been identified as having existed in Proto-Uralic form a small group, and largely pertain to plants and animals. Here are a few examples, and their implications.
A word for 'hedgehog,' reconstructed from evidence in Estonian and Hungarian. Hedgehogs do not live east of the Urals, but are found very, very far north (up to 61° latitude) in the areas west of them.
Words for 'bee' and 'honey,' borrowed from Proto-Indo-European. The bee-populated area of interaction between the Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European peoples could only have been in the region around the middle of the Volga (where we know apiculture was practiced since ancient times.) The honeybee would have been completely unknown anywhere east of the Urals.
Words for certain types of trees. Words for the following five types of trees are all able to be reconstructed in Proto-Uralic : Spruce [Picea obovata], Siberian Pine [Pinus sibirica], Siberian Fir [Abies sibirica], Siberian Larch [Larux sibirica], and one that is either the Brittle Willow [Salix fragilis] or the Elm [Ulmus].
Tree names have played a major role in the reconstructions of many proto-language homelands, and the case for Uralic is no different. According to some linguists, the only place where all five of these trees could have been found growing at the appropriate time would have been in a region stretching north from the Middle Urals, including the lower course of the river Ob.
Thus, the most likely homeland for the Proto-Uralic peoples, and thus the Finns and Estonians, was located in a region spanning from the middle of the Ural mountains down to the central Volga region. This theory is the most widely accepted and least controversial, but there are other theories out there which all have some merit to them. Here are a few other potential homelands:
tl;dr: The ancestors of the modern-day Finns and Estonians most likely lived in an area near both the Ural mountains and the Volga river, determined by linguistic evidence that the ancestors of the modern-day Uralic peoples were familiar with plants and animals that only could have existed all together in this region.
Lyle Campbell's "Historical Linguistics: An Introduction" is a fantastic source if you'd like to read more about historical linguistics in general. He covers cultural reconstruction very thoroughly and his is the text I would recommend to anyone interested in this kind of stuff.
Just to point out a small error in your post: while Estonian is related to Finnish, Latvian and Lithuanian are not, but rather comprise the Baltic family, a subset of Indo-European languages.
