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 borrowed between them, most often from Indo-European languages into Uralic ones. An example of a Uralic word that cannot be original is Finno-Ugric *"śata" "hundred". The Proto-Indo-European form of this word was *"ḱm̥tóm" (compare Latin "centum"), which became *"ćatám" in early Indo-Iranian (reanalyzed as the neuter nominative–accusative singular of an "a" stem > Sanskrit "śatá-", Avestan "sata-"). This is evidence that the word was borrowed into Finno-Ugric from Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan. This borrowing may have occurred in the region north of the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 2100–1800 BC, the approximate floruit of Indo-Iranian (Anthony 2007:371–411). It provides linguistic evidence for the