Languages of Finland Finnish and in Swedish. 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
Indo-Uralic languages (< "*pārsa") "pig". In the Indo-European word, *"-os" (> Finno-Ugric *"-as") is a masculine nominative singular ending, but it is quite meaningless in Uralic languages. This shows that the whole word was borrowed as a unit and is not part of the original Uralic vocabulary. (Further details on "*porćas" are given in the Appendix.) One of the most famous borrowings is the Finnish word "kuningas" "king" (< Proto-Finnic "*kuningas"), which was borrowed from Proto-Germanic "*kuningaz". Finnish has been very conservative in retaining the basic structure of the borrowed word, nearly preserving the nominative singular case marker reconstructed for Proto-Germanic masculine