Mistä Suomen kansa on peräisin?
Historical references to Northern Europe are scarce, and the names given to its peoples and geographic regions are obscure; therefore, the etymologies of the names are questionable. Such names as "Fenni", "Phinnoi", "Finnum", and "Skrithfinni" / "Scridefinnum" appear in a few written texts starting from about two millennia ago in association with peoples located in a northern part of Europe, but the real meaning of these terms is debatable. The earliest mentions of this kind are usually interpreted to have meant Fennoscandian hunter-gatherers whose closest successors in modern terms would be the Sami people. It has been suggested that this non-Uralic ethnonym is of Germanic language origin and related to such words as "finthan" (Old High German) 'find', 'notice'; "fanthian" (Old High German) 'check', 'try'; and "fendo" (Old High German) and "vende" (Old Middle German) 'pedestrian', 'wanderer'. Another etymological interpretation associates this ethnonym with "fen" in a more toponymical approach. Yet another theory postulates that the words "finn" and "kven" are cognates. The Icelandic Eddas and Norse sagas (11th to 14th centuries), some of the oldest written sources probably originating from the closest proximity, use words like "finnr" and "finnas" inconsistently. However, most of the time they seem to mean northern dwellers with a mobile life style. An etymological link between the Sami and the Finns exists in modern Uralic languages as well. It has been proposed that e.g. the toponyms "Sápmi" (Sami for Lapland), "Suomi" (Finnish for Finland), and "Häme" (Finnish for Tavastia) are of the same origin, the source of which might be related to the proto-Baltic word "*žeme" / Slavic "земля (zemlja)" meaning 'land'. It has been proposed that these designations started to mean specifically people in Southwestern Finland (Finland Proper, Varsinais-Suomi) and later the whole area of modern Finland. But it is not known how, why, and when this occurred. Petri Kallio has suggested that the name "Suomi" may bear even earlier Indo-European echoes with the original meaning of either "land" or "human".
Fennoscandian hunter-gatherers