Finnish language

Finnish language is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch that is spoken by the majority of the people in Finland as well as by ethnic Finns living in other countries. It is the language of the Finnish alphabet. Finnish is one of Finland's two official languages, the other being Swedish (the other being Swedish). It an official minority language in Sweden that both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has high mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are spoken by a small number of people. The Kven language, which, like Meänkieli, is completely interchangeable with Finnish, spoken in the Norwegian county of Troms og Finnmark by a small number of people of Finnish heritage who live in the area.

Finnish is agglutinative in structure and relies nearly entirely on suffixal affixation for agglutination. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numbers, and verbs are all inflected based on their function in the sentence, which is determined by their position in the phrase. However, because of the wide use of inflection, sentences may be constructed in any sequence other than the traditional subject–verb–object pattern. Word order variants are often reserved for situations when there is a difference in information structure. Originally developed from the Swedish alphabet, the orthography is a Latin-script alphabet in which each grapheme corresponds to a single phoneme and vice versa, with the exception of a few cases. There is a distinction between vowel length and consonant length, and there is a variety of diphthongs available, albeit vowel harmony restricts the number of diphthongs that may be used.