Finland

Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. Finnish is spoken by about 4.7 million speakers and Swedish is spoken by about 290,000 speakers. Finland has always been a multilingual country. Many Finns have another mother tongue than Finnish, but the language minorities in Finland are quite small.

The Swedish speakers mostly live either in land, on the west coast or in the southern part of Finland. A fourth of the Swedish speakers live in the Helsinki region.

Saami has semi-official status in Finland. Since 1992, it can be used in the courts in the Samiland region (also known as Lappland) in the northern part of Finland. There are about 6,000 Saami living in Finland, but only two thirds of them speak Saami.

Other minority languages spoken in Finland are Romani, Russian, and German. Romani is spoken by about 6,000 Romanies (also known as Gypsies). Russian and German are spoken by about 1,000 people each and they have lived in Finland for a decade or more.

There are about a thousand people speaking Tatar in Finland. They came to Finland in the 1980s when immigration in Finland increased.

In 1992, it was estimated that at least 90 different languages were spoken in Finland.

Finnish belongs to the Balto-Finnic language group, which is part of the Finno-Ugric language family. Its nearest relations are Estonian, Saami, and Hungarian.