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
Uralic–Yukaghir languages The Uralic negative verb represents a worn-down formation and is therefore presumably an old one. (2) It is built on an obsolete verb ‘to be’. (3) Most decisively, it is found in all branches of Uralic, including Samoyedic. Therefore, it is at least as ancient as Proto-Uralic, that is to say, some 4,500 or 6,500 years old, according to the two prevailing current estimates. The Yukaghir negative verb is unlikely to be borrowed from Uralic, because morphological formations are rarely borrowed. Yet no evidence for the Uralic/Yukaghir negative verb formation is found in the Indo-European languages. It thus seems likely