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
Paleo-European languages have occurred, with Uralic languages expanding in from the east. In particular, while the Sami languages of the indigenous Sami people belong in the Uralic family, they show considerable substrate influence, which is thought to represent one or more extinct original languages. The Sami are estimated to have adopted a Uralic language less than 2500 years ago. Some traces of indigenous languages of the Baltic area have been suspected in the Finnic languages as well, but they are much more modest. There are early loanwords from unidentified non-Indo-European languages in other Uralic languages of Europe, as well. Paleo-European languages The