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Finland's immigrant population is growing.[201] As of 2022, there were 508,173 people with a foreign background living in Finland (9.1% of the population), most of whom are from the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Somalia, Iraq and former Yugoslavia.[202] The children of foreigners are not automatically given Finnish citizenship, as Finnish nationality law practices and maintain jus sanguinis policy where only children born to at least one Finnish parent are granted citizenship. If they are born in Finland and cannot get citizenship of any other country, they become citizens.[203] Additionally, certain persons of Finnish descent who reside in countries that were once part of Soviet Union, retain the right of return, a right to establish permanent residency in the country, which would eventually entitle them to qualify for citizenship.[204] 476,857 people in Finland in 2022 were born in another country, representing 8,6 % of the population. The 10 largest foreign born groups are (in order) from Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Iraq, China, Somalia, Thailand, India, Vietnam and Turkey.[205]
Finnish and Swedish are the official languages of Finland. Finnish predominates nationwide while Swedish is spoken in some coastal areas in the west and south (with towns such as Ekenäs,[206] Pargas,[207] Närpes,[207] Kristinestad,[208] Jakobstad[209] and Nykarleby.[210]) and in the autonomous region of Åland, which is the only monolingual Swedish-speaking region in Finland.[211] The native language of 87.3% of the population is Finnish,[212][213] which is part of the Finnic subgroup of the Uralic language. The language is one of only four official EU languages not of Indo-European origin, and has no relation through descent to the other national languages of the Nordics. Conversely, Finnish is closely related to Estonian and Karelian, and more distantly to Hungarian and the Sami languages.
Swedish is the native language of 5.2% of the population (Swedish-speaking Finns).[214] Swedish is a compulsory school subject and general knowledge of the language is good among many non-native speakers.[215] Likewise, a majority of Swedish-speaking non-Ålanders can speak Finnish.[216] The Finnish side of the land border with Sweden is unilingually Finnish-speaking. The Swedish across the border is distinct from the Swedish spoken in Finland. There is a sizeable pronunciation difference between the varieties of Swedish spoken in the two countries, although their mutual intelligibility is nearly universal.[217]
Finnish Romani is spoken by some 5,000–6,000 people; Romani and Finnish Sign Language are also recognized in the constitution. There are two sign languages: Finnish Sign Language, spoken natively by 4,000–5,000 people,[218] and Finland-Swedish Sign Language, spoken natively by about 150 people. Tatar is spoken by a Finnish Tatar minority of about 800 people whose ancestors moved to Finland mainly during Russian rule from the 1870s to the 1920s.[219]
The Sámi languages have an official status in parts of Lapland, where the Sámi, numbering around 7,000,[220] are recognized as an indigenous people. About a quarter of them speak a Sami language as their mother tongue.[221] The Sami languages that are spoken in Finland are Northern Sami, Inari Sami, and Skolt Sami.[note 5] The rights of minority groups (in particular Sami, Swedish speakers, and Romani people) are protected by the constitution.[222] The Nordic languages and Karelian are also specially recognized in parts of Finland.
The largest immigrant languages are Russian (1.6%), Estonian (0.9%), Arabic (0.7%), English (0.5%) and Somali (0.4%).[223]