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
Indo-Uralic languages particle. Similarities have long been noted between the verb conjugation systems of Uralic languages (e.g. that of Finnish) and Indo-European languages (e.g. those of Latin, Russian, and Lithuanian). Although it would not be uncommon for a language to borrow heavily from the vocabulary of another language (as in the cases of English from French, Persian from Arabic, and Korean from Chinese), it would be extremely unusual for a language to borrow its basic system of verb conjugation from another. Supporters of the existence of Indo-Uralic have thus used morphological arguments to support the Indo-Uralic thesis by, for example, arguing that