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
Hungarian language 1,000,000 words. Parts of the Lexicon can be organized using word-bushes. (See an example on the right.) The words in these bushes share a common root, are related through inflection, derivation and compounding, and are usually broadly related in meaning. The basic vocabulary shares some hundreds word roots with other Uralic languages like Finnish, Estonian, Mansi and Khanty. Examples of such include the verb "él" 'live' (Finnish "elää"), the numbers "kettő" 'two', "három" 'three', "négy" 'four' (cf. Mansi китыг "kitig", хурум "khurum", нила "nila", Finnish "kaksi, kolme, neljä", Estonian "kaks, kolm, neli", ), as well as "víz" 'water', "kéz" 'hand',