Languages of Finland

The two “national” languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish. The official minority languages are three Sami languages, Romani, Finnish Sign Language and the Karelian language.

Finnish

Finnish is the main language of of the population. It is a Finnic language and as such related to e.g. Estonian. The Finnic languages belong to the Uralic language family, so Finnish is distantly related to languages as diverse as e.g. Hungarian (a Ugric language), the Sami languages, and languages such as Nenets in Siberia.

Swedish

Swedish is the main language of of the population (92.4% in the Åland autonomous province), down from 14% at the beginning of the 20th century. 47% of Finnish citizens can hold a conversation in Swedish , of which most live in the southern and western parts of Finland. It is a North Germanic language, closely related to Norwegian and Danish; as a subbranch of Indo-European, it is also related to other Germanic languages such as German and English and (more or less distantly) to languages as diverse as Hindi, and Russian.

Swedish was the language of the administration until the late 19th century. Now it is one of the two national languages, with a position equal to Finnish in most legislation (but the working language in most governmental bodies is Finnish). Both national languages are compulsory subjects...
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