Why Half of Finland Is Named After a Lake

In Britain, a surname is usually a job description that outlived the job. Smith hammered things, Baker baked things, Cooper made barrels and Thatcher, well, the less said the better. Finland took one look at that system and chose a different filing method entirely. Finns named themselves after the landscape. Half the phone book is water, hills and weather, which is why a Finnish classroom register can sound less like a list of children and more like a hiking route.

Virtanen comes from virta, a stream. Mäkinen from mäki, a hill. Laine means wave, Niemi a headland, Koskinen comes from koski, the rapids. Add the little suffix -nen (which works roughly like saying small or belonging to) and you have the national formula. Somewhere back down the line, your Finnish friend's family looked out of the window, saw a stream and decided that would do nicely. Forever.

Half the phone book is water, hills and weather.

Why the east and west of Finland disagree about names

For centuries Finland ran two entirely different naming systems at once. In the east, in Savo and Karelia, hereditary surnames like Korhonen are genuinely ancient, passed down through families for hundreds of years. In the west, your surname was often simply the name of the farm you lived on, which meant that when you moved house, your name moved with you. Buy a new farm and you were legally somebody else by teatime. Imagine the passport office.

Us foreigners like to complain that Finnish is hard, but spare a thought for the genealogists. Somewhere in every Finnish American family tree is a researcher who has just discovered their great-great-grandfather had three different surnames without once changing who he was.

The spring Finland renamed itself

Then came 1906 and one of the strangest mass makeovers in European history. Finland was still a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, national feeling was at full boil and thousands of Finns were walking around with Swedish surnames inherited from centuries of Swedish rule. The country's patriots decided the centenary of J.V.

Snellman (the philosopher who did more than anyone to make Finnish a language of state, not just of farms) deserved a proper gift. The gift was people. On and around 12 May 1906 Finns ditched their Swedish surnames and took Finnish ones by the tens of thousands. The name historian Sirkka Paikkala puts that one day at a little over 25,000, and across 1906 and 1907 the number reached about 70,000.

And here is the lovely part. Faced with a blank form and total freedom, an enormous number of them did not reach for warriors or heroes or ancient clans. They reached for scenery. Streams, waves, hills, ridges, islands and birches poured into the national registry, the romantic nationalism of the age pressed into two or three syllables. It remains possibly the only revolution in history conducted largely through landscape poetry and paperwork.

When did surnames become law?

Astonishingly late. Finland only made surnames compulsory with its first name act, passed in 1920 and in force from 1921, which means there were Finns walking around within living memory of your grandparents who legally did not have one.

The law tidied up the whole glorious mess in one go. Everyone needed a hereditary family name, wives and children took the husband's name (a rule since relaxed considerably) and the western habit of changing your name every time you changed your farm was quietly retired.

Whole families walked into an office as Lindqvists and walked out as lakes.

The battle of Korhonen and Virtanen

So who won the name game? For generations the answer was Virtanen, the little stream, the most 1906 name imaginable. Then, somewhere around 2010, something quietly seismic happened in the population registry, and it took the registry a few years to be sure of it.

Korhonen, the ancient eastern name, overtook Virtanen to become the most common surname in Finland, where it remains today. The old east beat the romantic west in the end and it did it the most Finnish way possible. Slowly, silently and without anyone holding a press conference.

How to read a Finnish surname

Once you know the code, every introduction becomes a tiny landscape painting. Meet a Järvinen and you are shaking hands with a lake. A Nieminen grew from a headland, a Mäkelä from the place on the hill, a Kivi is a stone and a Joki is a river with no decorative suffix at all, which frankly shows admirable restraint.

My own surname, for the record, means absolutely nothing in two languages, which after twenty years here still feels like turning up to a costume party in office wear.

A warning about the translated map

Every so often a map of Finland does the rounds with every place name translated word for word into English, and people fall about at Drool Lake, Testicle Lake and a river called Theft. The joke works because Finnish place names are made of ordinary words, so a literal reading is always available and usually ridiculous. The catch is that the literal reading is often not where the name came from.

Take Drool Lake. Kuolajärvi in eastern Lapland really was the official name of the whole municipality until it was renamed Salla in 1936, and kuola really does mean drool in modern Finnish. But the lake is far older than that word. Name scholars trace it to an old Sámi word for fish, the same root that gave the Kola Peninsula its name, so the honest translation is closer to Fish Lake. Nobody in Kuolajärvi spent decades being called Drool Lake. They spent decades being called something perfectly sensible that Finnish later made sound daft.

That is the rule for most of the funny ones. The map is a translation of what the words mean now, not of what the people who chose them meant. Surnames are the same. A Virtanen was never a small stream. They were a family who liked the sound of one.

Once you know the code, every introduction becomes a tiny landscape painting.

So next time a Finn hands you a business card, look past the job title. There is a nineteenth-century romantic hiding in the letterhead, a family that once stood at the edge of a field and chose the stream over the sword. Finland is one of the few countries where you can read the scenery in a phone book. The trees got the naming rights. Nobody has ever asked for them back.

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