Languages

Two Official Languages

Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, but you do not have to master them in order to make yourself understood, because English is widely spoken in Finland. Naturally knowing some Finnish or Swedish makes a good impression on your hosts. And a few Finnish words and expressions also make an exotic souvenir to take home with you.

A challenging language, but easy to pronounce

Finnish is spoken by approximately 92% of Finns, and Swedish is spoken as a native language by 5,5% of the population. There are 6 500 people, mainly in the north of Finland in Lapland, who speak Sámi (formerly known as Lappish) as their native language.

Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, related to Estonian and Sámi and more distantly to Hungarian. Swedish belongs to the northern branch of the Germanic languages.

The grammatical structure of Finnish differs widely from that of Indo-European languages. There are 15 cases appearing as suffixes on the ends of words, most of which correspond to prepositions in other languages. Adding a suffix usually affects the sound of the basic word in ways that can become quite complicated. There are no articles and no grammatical gender either so there is no difference between ‘he’ and ‘she’, both of which appear as ‘hän’ in the written language.

Finnish words tend to be rather long, but the pronunciation is easy and the words are pronounced the way they are written. Just remember to put the stress on the first syllable of the word.