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 between Uralic and Yukaghir, but for a Uralic–Yukaghir language family, in his "Introduction to the Uralic Languages" (1965:30): Collinder goes on to compare Uralic with Indo-European (1965:30–34). He begins by saying, "An Indo-Uralic affinity is far from being strictly proved", and emphasizes that he has not been able to find as many "plausible" cognates for Uralic and Indo-European as for Uralic and Yukaghir, at most about twenty. He then goes on to list 15 of these cognates, with reflexes in Uralic and Indo-European languages, and to discuss similarities between Uralic and Indo-European in morphology. He makes no explicit statement on