![]() | This article or section should specify the language of its non-English content, using {{lang}}, {{transliteration}} for transliterated languages, and {{IPA}} for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used. (May 2022) |
Finnish | |
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suomi | |
Pronunciation | IPA: [ˈsuo̯mi] ⓘ |
Native to | Finland, Sweden, Norway (in small areas in Troms og Finnmark), Russia |
Ethnicity | Finns |
Native speakers | 5.8 million Finland: 5.4 million Sweden: 0.40 million Norway: 8,000 (Kven) Republic of Karelia: 8,500 US: 26,000 (2020)[1] |
Uralic
| |
Dialects | |
Latin (Finnish alphabet) Finnish Braille | |
Signed Finnish | |
Official status | |
Official language in | ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Recognised minority language in | |
Regulated by | Language Planning Department of the Institute for the Languages of Finland |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | fi |
ISO 639-2 | fin |
ISO 639-3 | fin |
Glottolog | finn1318 excluding Kven and Meänkieli |
Linguasphere | 41-AAA-a |
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Finnish (endonym: suomi [ˈsuo̯mi] ⓘ or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li]) is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish). In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish[3]) are official minority languages. The Kven language, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian county Troms og Finnmark by a minority group of Finnish descent.
Finnish is typologically agglutinative[4] and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in the sentence. Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows them to be ordered differently. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information structure.[5] Finnish orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, and is phonetic to a great extent. Vowel length and consonant length are distinguished, and there are a range of diphthongs, although vowel harmony limits which diphthongs are possible.