Finnish belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family; as such, it is one of the few European languages that is not Indo-European. The Finnic branch also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken … 展开

Today, Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish), and has been an official language of the 展开

Prehistory
The Uralic family of languages, of which Finnish is a member, are hypothesized to derive from a single ancestor language termed Proto … 展开

There are two main registers of Finnish used throughout the country. One is the "standard language" (yleiskieli), and the other is the "spoken language" (puhekieli). The standard language is used in formal situations like political speeches and newscasts. Its written … 展开

Finnish is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland. There are also notable Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The majority of the population of Finland (90.37% as of … 展开

The dialects of Finnish are divided into two distinct groups, Western and Eastern. The dialects are largely mutually intelligible and are distinguished from each other by changes in vowels, diphthongs and rhythm, as well as in preferred grammatical … 展开

Segmental phonology
The phoneme inventory of Finnish is moderately small, with a great number of vocalic segments and a … 展开