More than 90 per cent of Finns speak Finnish as their mother tongue. And Finnish belongs to a language group with two 'cousins' in Europe - Estonian and Hungarian.
All three are members of the Uralic family of languages, which is far removed from the Scandinavian language group.
Less well known is that Finland has two official languages, and the other one, spoken by more than 250,000 residents of this tiny country (in terms of population), is Swedish.
Most Swedish speakers in Finland can be found in population centres along the central portion of the country's long Baltic coast and around the capital, Helsinki, in the far south of the country.
Because of the shared history of Finland and Sweden and its 586km mutual border, the Swedish language has been used broadly in large tracts of Finland for centuries.
Swedish, or rather 'Finland Swedish', is the first language for about 5.5 per cent of Finland's population.