Inhabitants
The inhabitants of Karelian provinces historically belonging to Finland are known as Karelians. Confusingly, the same name is used also of a closely related but distinct ethnic group living mostly in East Karelia, earlier also in some of the territories Finland ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944. The Finnish Karelians include the present-day inhabitants of North and South Karelia and the still-surviving evacuees from the ceded territories. Present Finnish Karelia has 315,000 inhabitants. The more than 400,000 evacuees from the ceded territories were re-settled in various parts of Finland. (The displacement of the Finnish Karelians in 1940-44 as a result of the Winter War and the Continuation War, according to official Finnish statistics resulted the total number of 415,000 evacuees from the territories ceded to the Soviet Union while 5.000 Finnish Karelians remained in the Soviet controlled territory.)
Finnish Karelians are considered as a regional and cultural sub-group of the ethnic Finns. They speak the eastern or south-eastern dialects of the Finnish language. The Finnish Karelians include also people of East Karelian origin or roots, but these have been linguistically and ethnically assimilated with closely related Finns after the Second World War. However, the Orthodox religion is still maintained by many Finnish Karelians with East Karelian background, especially in North Karelia; the majority of the Finnish Karelians are predominantly Lutheran.
Read more about this topic: Karelia (historical Province Of Finland)
Famous quotes containing the word inhabitants:
“The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There were three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except for a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in their season.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)