Languages Spoken in Finland

There were more than 150 spoken languages in Finland in 2010. Over 90 % of the population, which is almost 5 million, spoke Finnish. The chart below shows ten most spoken languages in Finland in the year 2010. Two main official languages in Finland are Finnish and Swedish.

Source: Kielemme kohtalo, page 50

Seven years later in 2017 the situation has changed. Tilastokeskus has published last year's statistics of population in Finland. The population in 2017 was 5 513 130. Last year 373 325 people, which is 7 % of population, spoke foreign languages as mother tongue. The chart shows the most common foreign languages spoken in Finland. Finnish and Swedish are still two most spoken languages. This chart shows only foreign languages.

Source: Tilastokeskus

The languages in the chart are venäjä = Russian, viro = Estonian, arabia = Arabic, somali = Somali language, englanti = English, kurdi = Kurdish, persia = Persian, kiina = Chinese, albania = Albanian, vietnam = Vietnamese, thai = Thai, espanja = Spanish, turkki = Turkish, saksa = German and puola = Polish.

Numbers show how many people speak those languages. Blue line represents the speakers last year and green line represents the speakers ten years ago. Arabic has raised above English and Somali and Persian has raised above Albanian and Chinese.

Official languages in Finland are Finnish, Swedish, Sami languages, Romani language and Finnish sign language. In 2010 about 1 800 people spoke Sami languages. There are about 10 000 Romani people in Finland but only about 3 000 of them know the Romani language. Finnish sign language is a mother tongue of 4 000 - 5 000 deaf people but also 10 000 hearing people use it.

Sources: www.stat.fi and the book ”Kielemme kohtalo” written by Vesa Heikkinen & Harri Mantila