ABSTRACT
Finland is a large, but sparsely populated country with an inherently ‘multilingual’ history. Its present population of 5 million inhabitants inherits a linguistic history moulded by foreign occupation and other forms of intervention, and the fact that its major language, Finnish, is not an Indo-European language. About 94 per cent of the population has Finnish as the mother tongue, about 6 per cent, Swedish and less than 1 per cent, Sami. These languages are official languages of the country English is the most widely used foreign language, followed by German.
