Finland is home to the annual Air Guitar World Championships.
There are many approaches to promoting world peace — giving Nobel Prizes, developing diplomatic agreements — but none is quite as awesome as playing air guitar. In fact, that’s why the Air Guitar World Championships were created: The organization’s official website proclaims that “wars will end, climate change will stop and all bad things will vanish when all the people in the world play the air guitar.”
In keeping with that (perhaps overly optimistic) outlook, each competition ends with every contestant playing the air guitar “all at once to save the world.” For close to 30 years, people have traveled from around the globe to Oulu, Finland, to participate, but not without first winning their respective national championships. As of 2024, there were 12 national championships, with participating nations including France, Thailand, Chile, Canada, and beyond. At the 2023 festivities on August 25, Nanami “Seven Seas” Nagura from Japan was crowned the overall champion. It was her third time taking home the trophy, making her the most successful competitor in the Air Guitar World Championships’ history.
While standard Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are similar enough to be considered mutually intelligible, Finnish is part of the obscure Finno-Ugric language family, along with Hungarian and Estonian — three tongues with grammatical structures that make them notoriously difficult for non-native speakers to learn. That’s especially true of Finnish, which consistently ranks among the world’s most intimidating languages. If you find yourself trying to converse with a Finn, you may need to ask them “Puhuisitteko hieman hitaammin?” (“Can you speak more slowly?”)
