ABSTRACT
A member of the Balto-Finnic group of Finno-Ugric, Finnish is the official language of Finland (jointly with the minority Swedish). Finnish is spoken in Finland by around 6 million, with considerable émigré bilingual communities abroad, e.g. over half a million in North America. Typologically it lies at the periphery not just of Finno-Ugric, but even of Balto-Finnic. Within Europe it is very closely related to Estonian – the resemblance is very obvious – and very distantly related to Hungarian, to which it bears no aural or visual resemblance whatever.
