Languages - Finnish and Swedish Official Languages
Finland is officially bilingual: Finnish is the first language of 92%, and Swedish of 5.5% of the population. About 1,700 people in Lapland speak Sami (Lapp) languages.
Swedish-speaking Finns, of which there are about 300,000, are concentrated mainly along the coastlines of the south and the south-west archipelago and along the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia to the west. Swedish is the official language on the Åland Islands.
Since Finnish is the mother tongue of only about five million people in the world, the ability to speak foreign languages is essential for Finns. This is an advantage to foreign visitors, because many Finns speak English, German or some other European language.
Unlike Swedish, Russian, English and almost all other European languages, Finnish does not belong to the Indo-European family. Together with its close relative Estonian and distantly related Hungarian, it is a member of the Finno-Ugrian group of languages, spoken by only about 20 million people in total.
Finnish has a reputation as a difficult language. Its characteristic features include an absence of definite and indefinite articles and of the distinction between male and female pronouns ("hän" means both "he" and "she"), and the rarity of prepositions, compensated for by the declension of nouns. For example: "auto" = car; "autossa" = in a (the) car; "autoon" = into a (the) car.
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