The Finnish language has a reputation for being, shall we say, challenging for foreigners to learn (some would claim impossible). Yet those who defy this reputation and decide to study Finnish soon discover its beautiful and harmonic qualities – and the logic in its sometimes complicated grammar.
Many people assume that Finnish is closely related to either Swedish or Russian, as Sweden and Russia are both important neighbouring countries. However, that is not the case. Swedish and Russian are both Indo-European languages, whereas Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family of languages.
The Finno-Ugric language family also includes Estonian, Sámi and Hungarian – not to mention a number of languages spoken in the Russian Federation, like Karelian and Mari.
There are approximately five million people who speak Finnish. Most Finnish speakers live in Finland, though some live in Sweden, Estonia, Norway, Russia and North America.
Finnish is one of the two official languages in Finland (the other being Swedish) and one of the official languages of the European Union. It also has minority language status in Sweden.
