Introduction
Languages in Finland
Finnish is spoken by roughly 5 million people; not only in Finland but in Sweden and the United States too.
It is in no way related to any other Scandinavian language and is widely considered one of the most difficult languages to learn. Finnish is not an Indo-European language either – it belongs to the Uralic group of languages which includes Hungarian and Estonian.
Although Finland is bilingual between Finnish and Swedish, more then 90% of the population can only speak Finnish. Swedish is the mother tongue for around 5% of the population, most of whom are located in and around the south west coast. There are no major cities in Finland that are predominantly Swedish-speaking.
Although approximately half of Finland's population speak English as a second language, Finnish is totally dominant in everyday life. German is probably the next most commonly spoken language in Finland after English, though knowledge of any other language is usually quite scarce.
How hard is it to learn Finnish?
If you have made the decision to learn Finnish, it is best to begin in a methodical way. Its structures and forms, and therefore the way it expresses ideas, are fundamentally different from other European languages.
There are a number of basic grammatical concepts that you need to grasp before you can start to build up your knowledge of the language. Unlike many European languages there are no genders. A student of Finnish would also have to learn the rules regarding long and short vowels, as well as long and short consonants.
Another notable characteristic of the Finnish language is the use of inflection. Endings and cases are added to words to represent different grammatical functions. This would explain how some Finnish words become so long!
Also in this section
- Introduction: Languages in Finland
- Learning the language: How to learn Finnish
- Language tests: Finnish language proficiency