Home > Finnish

• It can indicate nationality of the Finns, usually acquired by birth in Finland
• It can indicate ethnicity, see Finnic, Ethnic Finn and Sweden-Finns
• It can also indicate citizenship of the Finns; or a similar belonging to the state of Finland
• It can indicate the mother tongue of a speaker, see Finnish language and Sweden-Finns (often in contrast to Finns speaking Swedish as their mother tongue, see Finland-Swedish and Finland's language strife)
• It can indicate the Finnish language itself, and often the closely related varietiesA dialect is a variant, or variety, of a language spoken in a certain geographical area. The number of speakers, and the area itself, can be of arbitrary size. It follows that a dialect for a larger area can contain plenty of (sub-) dialects, which in tur spoken in Finland's neighbourhood, see Finno-Ugric languagesThe Finno-Ugric languages form a subfamily of the Uralic languages. The majority of linguists believe that the Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian, among others should be included in the group. Unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, the Finno-Ug: VepsVeps belongs to the Baltic- Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric languages. According to Soviet statistics 8,000 people were self-designated Veps speakers at the end of the 1970s. The statistics are however considered extremely unreliable by most non-Soviet li, Izhorian, Ingrian, KarelianThe Karelian language is a variety closely related to Finnish. It belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages, and is chiefly distinguished from standard Finnish by the lack of influence from modern 19th and 20th century Finnish. The Karelian language does not h, Meänkieli
• Finally, it can be a false translation from Scandinavian languages, where the concepts of Finns and Samis haven't always been distinguished; Until recently Finn in the Norwegian language meant a Sami.