The minorities of Finland

Sámi People

The Sámi people are the original inhabitants of Lapland and have lived in the area for thousands of years. They have their own language and culture which is based on their close relationship with nature. In the past they lived by hunting, fishing and farming reindeer and they were nomadic. Nowadays, they have more modern lifestyle but there are still reindeer farmers in Lapland. There are about 8000 Sámi people and about a third speaks sami language as their mother tongue. More of Finland’s indigenous Sámi people live in the Helsinki area than in any single locality in their arctic homeland, but they face challenges in maintaining their language, culture and identity. Sami people have also used the name of the Lapps.

Sámi traditional residential area.

Sami National Day is 6th of February. That day was organized the first general meeting of Sámi in Trondheim year 1917.

Sámis’ national dress

Swedish speaking Finns

Swedish speaking Finns are in Finland living and Swedish talking people. They were born in Finland, and if someone who speaks Swedish moves to Finland are not. There are about 340 000 Swedish speaking Finns in Finland. They are Finns and anyone doesn’t think they would be foreigners.
Swedish is vernacular language in Finland and everyone should speak it, exspecially people who work on service careers. We must study it in school.

Finland has been part of Sweden about 300 years ago. Then Swedish was an officialese. It was really difficult for people who speak Finnish. Finnish was taken to official language with Swedish and these two languages have stayed since then.
Swedish speaking Finns are falling away, on year 1900 12.9% inhabitants of Finland was Swedish speaking Finns and now just 5.4%.


If you know the Moomies, you should know Tove Jansson. She is Swedish speaking Finn and she has written Moomies (: Other Swedish speaking Finns are rally driver, Marcus Grönholm, singer and model Kim Herold, first president of Finland Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg and actress Maria Sid.

Romani people in Finland

Romanis are minority people in Finland. There is about 10 000 romanis in Finland. Romani people came from India. They came to Finland in the 16th century via Baltic countries. The biggiest part of them speaks finnish nowadays but they also have their own language. It has borrowed words from the nearby Slavic languages and also from Hungarian and Turkish languages. When they came to Finland they got despised at first because they were vagabonds and people thought that they were different. Romanis have their own costumes called ”röijy.”

Romanis have played an important role in the arts, sciences and engineering.  There are also some celebrity romanis in Finland, like Remu Aaltonen who belonged in the famous finnish rockband called The Hurriganes and Amadeus Lundberg who is singer in Finland.