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
Proto-Uralic language Proto-Uralic was an agglutinative nominative–accusative language. Proto-Uralic nouns are reconstructed with at least six noun cases and three numbers, singular, dual and plural. Grammatical gender was not recognized and no Uralic language does so even today. Noun articles were unknown. The plural marker of nouns was *"-t" in final position and *"-j-" in non-final position, as seen in Finnish "talot" and "talojen" ("house" Pl.Nom and Pl.Gen). The dual marker has been reconstructed as *"-k-", but the dual number has been lost in many of the contemporary Uralic languages. The cases were: The cases had only one three-way locative contrast of