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
Indo-Uralic languages Whether the "e" placed in parentheses is inherently part of the word is disputed but probable. The "ḷ" in Indo-European "*pḷlu-" represents a vocalic "l", a sound found in English in for instance "little", where it corresponds to the "-le", and "metal", where it corresponds to the "-al". An earlier form of the Indo-European word was probably "*pelu-". An asterisk (*) indicates reconstructed forms. A tilde (~) means 'alternating with'. Indo-Uralic languages Indo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic. A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in