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 linguistic science may yet be able to resolve some of these seemingly intractable issues (cf. Vajda 2008). Häkkinen (2012) rejects a genetic link between Uralic and Yukaghir, arguing that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes instead that many apparent Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are really borrowed from an early stage of Uralic (ca. 3000 BC; he dates Proto-Uralic at ca. 2000 BC) into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was (according to him) spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal. Aikio (2014) agrees that Uralic–Yukaghir