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
Indo-Uralic languages vocabulary common to Indo-European and Uralic remains. As examples they advance such comparisons as Proto-Uralic *' (or *') : Proto-Indo-European *', oblique stem *', both meaning 'water', and Proto-Uralic *' (or *') : Proto-Indo-European *', both meaning 'name'. In contrast to *' and *', the phonology of these words shows no sound changes from Indo-European daughter languages such as Indo-Iranian. In contrast to *' and *"", they show no morphological affixes from Indo-European that are absent in Uralic. According to advocates of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, the resulting core of common vocabulary can only be explained by the hypothesis of common