[or Ahlquist; August Engelbert]. Finnish philologist, born at Kuopio, province of Kuopio, in the grand duchy of Finland, on the 7th of August 1826. He studied philosophy and philology at Helsingfors, and in 1847 founded a newspaper, the Suometar, a Finnish name for his own country. The years 1853–58 were spent in travel through northern Russia and Siberia, and on his return he became professor of Finnish in the University of Helsingfors. He devoted his life to the study of Finnish dialects and to making his native speech an instrument of literature. Besides a Wotish grammar and treatises on the Ural-Altaic languages and the Finnish of the west, he published a volume of native poems, under the title of Säkeniä, or Sparks, and translations from Schiller.
