World Language Map

Where is Finnish spoken?

Finnish (suomi) is an Uralic language, spoken in Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Norway and 1 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Finnish is spoken

Finnish is spoken in 5 countries: Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Norway and 1 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Finland94%5,288,825
Estonia21%250,696
Sweden2.2%232,976
NorwayNot givenNot given
RussiaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Finnish is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Finnish.

How many people speak Finnish?

Wikidata gives about 5.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Finnish sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Finnish as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Uralic
  2. Finnic
  3. Coastal Finnic
  4. Neva
  5. North Finnic
  6. Nuclear Finnish
  7. Finnish

Related languages

Other languages in the Nuclear Finnish group:

More about Finnish

Codes: ISO 639-3 fin, Glottolog finn1318. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Finnish

Where is Finnish spoken?

Finnish is spoken in Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Norway and 1 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 94% of the population of Finland, which is about 5,288,825 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Finnish?

Wikidata gives about 5.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Finnish in?

Glottolog places Finnish in the Uralic family, in the branch Finnic, Coastal Finnic, Neva, North Finnic and Nuclear Finnish.

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