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
Uralic–Yukaghir languages World's Languages" by Merritt Ruhlen (1987). Uralic and Yukaghir are listed as a language family, forming a subgroup of a higher-order family called "Eurasiatic", in Joseph Greenberg's "Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives" (2000–2002). However, Greenberg did not present a discursive argument for this subgroup, presumably leaving it to the reader to work it out from the data on grammar and vocabulary he presented. The Uralic–Yukaghir family has been accepted by the American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard (2008:176, citing Ruhlen 1987:64–65) but without presenting any argument for it, and Russian linguist Vladimir Napolskikh. Collinder summarizes his case for, not merely a relationship