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
Finnish language region and/or the bend of the middle Volga. The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, United States classifies Finnish as a level III language (of 4 levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers. Finnish is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland. There are also notable Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The