Finnish language

Finnish, known to its speakers as *suomi* or *suomen kieli*, is a Finnic language within the Uralic family. It is the first language of most people in Finland and is also spoken by ethnic Finns abroad. Alongside Swedish, Finnish is one of Finland’s two official languages, and it has held official status in the European Union since 1995. In Sweden, both Finnish and the closely related Meänkieli are recognized as official minority languages, while Kven—also mutually intelligible with Finnish—is spoken by a small Finnish-descent community in Norway’s Troms and Finnmark counties. For sociohistorical reasons, Meänkieli and Kven are treated as independent languages in their respective countries, not as dialects of Finnish.

Typologically, Finnish is agglutinative and relies almost entirely on suffixes attached to word stems. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, and verbs all change form depending on their grammatical role. The usual sentence order is subject–verb–object, but because inflection marks relationships so clearly, word order can shift to highlight different parts of the information. The writing system uses a Latin-script alphabet based on the Swedish one and is largely phonemic. Vowel and consonant length are both distinctive, and while Finnish has many diphthongs, vowel harmony restricts which combinations are allowed.

**Classification** Finnish is part of the Finnic branch of the Uralic family, making it one of the few European languages not Indo-European. This branch also includes Estonian and several minority languages around the Baltic Sea and in Russia’s Republic of Karelia. Finnish’s closest relative is either Ingrian or, depending on classification, Karelian. The Finnic languages form a dialect continuum: no single isogloss cleanly separates “Finnish” from “Estonian” dialects, even though the standard languages are not mutually intelligible.

Finnish shares several features with other Uralic languages like Hungarian and the Sami languages. These include case suffixes such as the genitive *-n*, the partitive *-(t)a / -(t)ä* (from a Proto-Uralic ablative), and the essive *-na / -nä* (from a locative). Plural markers include *-t* and *-i-*, and possessive suffixes like first-person singular *-ni* and second-person singular *-si* also trace back to Proto-Uralic. Derivational suffixes, such as the causative *-tta/-ttä*, are shared as well. Basic