FinnishLanguage

Finnish language, or suomi, is a Uralic language in the Finnic branch. It is most closely related to Estonian and Karelian and is distant from the Indo-European languages surrounding it. It is the majority language of Finland and one of the country’s official languages; Swedish is the other official language. It is spoken by about 5 to 6 million people, primarily in Finland, with minority communities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, and North America. It is also one of the 24 official languages of the European Union.

Linguistic features include a highly inflected, agglutinative structure with a large number of grammatical cases—about 15—used to indicate tense, mood, number, and case relations. The language employs vowel harmony and consonant gradation, has no grammatical gender and no definite or indefinite articles, and relies on word endings rather than word order to convey meaning. Finnish word order is relatively flexible, with a typical base of subject–verb–object in simple statements, but it can vary in subordinate clauses.

Writing system and standardization: Finnish uses the Latin alphabet with the diacritics ä, ö, and å, and orthography is largely phonemic. Standard Finnish, based on southern varieties, is codified and taught nationwide. The Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotimaisten kielten tutkimuskeskus, KOTUS) documents usage, develops language policy, and maintains dictionaries and reference works. Finnish is a key official language of the European Union.

Regional and social context: In Finland, Finnish coexists with Swedish as an official language; there are many dialects and regional varieties. It is also spoken by diaspora communities abroad and has influenced other languages and linguistic research.