Languages of Finland Languages of Finland The two main official languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish. There are also several official minority languages: three variants of Sami, Romani, Finnish Sign Language and Karelian. Finnish is the language of the majority, 89% of the population. It is a Finnic language closely related to Estonian and less closely to the Sami languages. The Finnic languages belong to the Uralic language family, so Finnish is distantly related to languages as diverse as Hungarian (a Ugric language) and Nenets (a Samoyedic language) in Siberia. Swedish is the main language of 5.3% of the population (92.4% in
Uralic–Yukaghir languages his 1931 book "Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century" (p. 338). Pedersen included both languages in his proposed Nostratic language family (ib.). A genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir was argued for in "Jukagirisch und Uralisch" ('Yukaghir and Uralic'), a 1940 work by Björn Collinder, one of the leading Uralic specialists of the 20th century (Greenberg 2005:124). Collinder was inspired by a 1907 article by Heikki Paasonen, which pointed to similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir, though it did not identify the two languages as genetically related (Greenberg, ib.). Uralic–Yukaghir is listed as a language family in "A Guide to the