Languages of Finland
| Languages of Finland | |
|---|---|
| Official languages |
Finnish (1st: 94%, 2nd: 6%) Swedish (1st: 5%, 2nd: 44%) |
| Minority languages | official: Sami, Romani, Finnish Sign Language, Karelian language |
| Main immigrant languages | Russian, Estonian |
| Main foreign languages |
English (70%) German (18%) French (3%) |
| Sign languages | Finnish Sign Language, Finland-Swedish Sign Language |
| Common keyboard layouts |
Basic Finnish/Swedish  Finnish Multilingual 
|
| Source | [2] (europa.eu) |
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, 91% 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 5.4% of the population (92.4% in the Åland autonomous province), down from 14% at the beginning of the 20th century. In 2012, 44% of Finnish citizens with another registered primary language than Swedish could hold a conversation in this language. Swedish is a North Germanic language, closely related to Norwegian and Danish. As a subbranch of Indo-European, it is also closely related to other Germanic languages such as German and English.
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