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LanguageFinland has 2 official languages. Finnish is spoken by 93% of the population; Swedish by the other 7%. Although Finnish existed as a spoken language for centuries, it was first reduced to a written alphabet only in the mid 16th century. It is believed that Finnish originated with the tribes who migrated from the Ural mountains thousands of years ago; because of its origins, Finnish belongs to the Finno- Ugric group, part of the Uralian family of languages. Other languages in this group are Estonia, certain Russian dialects and Hungarian. Swedish belongs to the Germanic-Scandinavian group of the Indo-European family of languages; other languages in this group are Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic. The languages of the rest of Europe also belong to the Indo-European family. The Finnish language is phonetic, that is, every letter is pronounced, and pronounced the same way every time. Finnish has no articles or separate prepositions; it has no gender. Instead, it has 15 cases where the root of a word is supplemented by suffixes, prepositions and post positions to show relationships, time, place, object, etc. For more on the Finnish language, see Finnish for Foreigners (Tavataan taas) Finnish Courses at Columbia University, New York
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