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
Finnish phonology stressed) or "luo" 'towards'. This might make them easier to pronounce as true opening diphthongs (in some accents even wider opening ) and not as centering diphthongs , which are more common in the world's languages. The opening diphthongs come from earlier long mid vowels: . Since that time new long mid vowels have come to the language from various sources. Among the phonological processes operating in Finnish dialects are diphthongization and diphthong reduction. For example, Savo Finnish has the phonemic contrast of vs. vs. instead of standard language contrast of vs. vs. . Finnish, like many other Uralic languages,