ABSTRACT
Finnish (native name: suomi) is the first language of some four and a half million people in Finland (roughly 95 per cent of the population), and of approximately half a million people living in Sweden, Norway, Estonia, and Russia. Census statistics show a steady decline in native speakers of Finnish in Russia, from about 60 per cent of 92,000 declaring themselves Finns in 1959 to about 35 per cent of 67,000 in 1989 (Ktinnap 1992). There are also significant pockets of speakers in the United States and Canada, chiefly around the Great Lakes; the emigratory surge to these countries was at the tum of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
