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 resemblances seems uncomfortably high. The strongly divergent sound systems of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic are an aggravating factor both in the morphological and the lexical realm, making it additionally difficult to judge resemblances and interpret them as either borrowings, possible cognates or chance resemblances. A second type of evidence advanced in favor of an Indo-Uralic family is lexical. Numerous words in Indo-European and Uralic resemble each other (see list below). The problem is to weed out cognates due to borrowing. Uralic languages have been in contact with a succession of Indo-European languages for millennia. As a result, many words have been