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
Uralic–Yukaghir languages In 1933, the pioneering Indo-Europeanist Holger Pedersen published a comparative study of the verb endings in Uralic and Indo-European. According to Pedersen (1933: §8), the Uralic negative verb was formed from a verb "*e-" meaning 'be' plus the personal endings, which are identical to the personal pronouns. For instance, for the verb "*mene" 'go', the Proto-Uralic forms would have been: 1s. "*e-m mene", 2s. "*e-t mene"; 1p. "*e-me mene", 2p. "*e-te mene" meaning 'I do not go', 'thou dost not go', etc., literally 'be-me go', 'be-thou go', etc. The Uralic negative particle "*ne" 'not' would have originally formed part of