Jarvinen

Herkunft & Geschichte

Derived from 'järvi', the Finnish word for 'lake', combined with the diminutive suffix '-nen'. Finland has more lakes per unit area than any other country on earth — over 188,000 — and the lake has been a defining element of Finnish landscape, livelihood, and cultural imagination. Järvinen thus means 'of the lake' or 'lake dweller', and arose independently in countless lakeside communities across central and eastern Finland. The name is especially concentrated in the Finnish Lakeland (Savo and Karelia), where lakes dominate the geography so completely that virtually every village was identified by the name of its adjacent lake.