Demographics of Finland
Encyclopedia
This article is about the demographic
Demographics
Demographics are the most recent statistical characteristics of a population. These types of data are used widely in sociology , public policy, and marketing. Commonly examined demographics include gender, race, age, disabilities, mobility, home ownership, employment status, and even location...

 features of the population
Population
A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...

 of Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

, including population density
Population density
Population density is a measurement of population per unit area or unit volume. It is frequently applied to living organisms, and particularly to humans...

, ethnicity
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...

, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.

Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

numbers some 5.4 million and has an average population density of 17 inhabitants per square kilometre. This makes it the third most sparsely populated country in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, after Iceland
Iceland
Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...

 and Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

. Population distribution is very uneven: the population is concentrated on the small southwestern coastal plain. About 64% live in towns and cities, with one million living in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area alone. In Arctic Lapland, on the other hand, there are only 2 people to every square kilometre.

The country is ethnically homogeneous, the dominant ethnicity being Finnish people. The official languages are Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

 and Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

, the latter being the native language of about five per cent of the Finnish population. From the 13th to the early 19th century Finland was a part of the Kingdom of Sweden. The Swedish-speakers are known as Swedish-speaking Finns (finlandssvenskar in Swedish, suomenruotsalaiset in Finnish).

With 79 percent of Finns in its congregation, the Lutheran Church is the largest in the country.

The earliest inhabitants of most of the land area that makes up today's Finland and Scandinavia were in all likehood hunter-gatherers whose closest successors in modern terms would probably be the Sami people
Sami people
The Sami people, also spelled Sámi, or Saami, are the arctic indigenous people inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of far northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between south and middle Sweden and Norway. The Sámi are Europe’s northernmost...

 (formerly known as the Lapps). There are 4,500 of them living in Finland today and they are recognised as a minority and speak three distinct languages: Northern Sami
Northern Sami
Northern or North Sami is the most widely spoken of all Sami languages. The speaking area of Northern Sami covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland...

, Inari Sami
Inari Sami
Inari Sámi is a Uralic, Sami language spoken by the Inari Sami of Finland. It has approximately 300 speakers, the majority of whom are middle-aged or older and live in the municipality of Inari. According to the Sami Parliament of Finland 269 persons used Inari Sami as their first language. It is...

 and Skolt Sami
Skolt Sami
Skolt Sami is a Uralic, Sami language spoken by approximately 400 speakers in Finland, mainly in Sevettijärvi, and approximately 20–30 speakers of the Njuõˊttjäuˊrr dialect in an area surrounding Lake Lovozero in Russia. Skolt Sami used to also be spoken on the Neiden area of Norway,...

. They have been living north of the Arctic Circle
Arctic Circle
The Arctic Circle is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth. For Epoch 2011, it is the parallel of latitude that runs north of the Equator....

 for more than 7,000 years now, but today are a 5% minority in their native Lapland Province. During the late 19th and 20th century there was significant emigration
Emigration
Emigration is the act of leaving one's country or region to settle in another. It is the same as immigration but from the perspective of the country of origin. Human movement before the establishment of political boundaries or within one state is termed migration. There are many reasons why people...

, particularly from rural areas to Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 and North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

, while most immigrants into Finland itself come from other European countries.

Population

Total population
  • At the end of 2008: 5,304,840
  • At the end of 2009: 5,351,427
  • At the end of 2010: 5,375,276

Age structure

At the end of 2009.
  • 0-14 years: 16.6% (male 459,950; female 441,220)
  • 15-64 years: 66.4% (male 1,772,600; female 1,734,450)
  • 65 years and over: 17.0% (male 351,180; female 517,530)

Families

The profound demographic and economic changes that occurred in Finland after World War II affected the Finnish family. Families became smaller, dropping from an average of 3.6 persons in 1950 to an average of 2.7 by 1975. Family composition did not change much in that quarter of a century, however, and in 1975 the percentage of families that consisted of a man and a woman was 24.4; of a couple and children, 61.9; of a woman with offspring, 11.8; of a man and offspring, 1.9. These percentages are not markedly different from those of 1950. Change was seen in the number of children per family, which fell from an average of 2.24 in 1950 to an average of 1.7 in the mid-1980s, and large families were rare. Only 2 percent of families had four or more children, while 51 percent had one child; 38 percent, two children; and 9 percent, three children. The number of Finns under the age of 18 dropped from 1.5 million in 1960 to 1.2 million in 1980.

Vital statistics

Births and deaths

Average population (x 1000) Live births Deaths Natural change Crude birth rate (per 1000) Crude death rate (per 1000) Natural change (per 1000)
1900 2 646 86 339 57 915 28 424 32.6 21.9 10.7
1901 2 667 88 637 56 225 32 412 33.2 21.1 12.2
1902 2 686 87 082 50 999 36 083 32.4 19.0 13.4
1903 2 706 85 120 49 992 35 128 31.5 18.5 13.0
1904 2 735 90 253 50 227 40 026 33.0 18.4 14.7
1905 2 762 87 841 52 773 35 068 31.8 19.1 12.7
1906 2 788 91 401 50 857 40 544 32.8 18.2 14.5
1907 2 821 92 457 53 028 39 429 32.8 18.8 14.0
1908 2 861 92 146 55 305 36 841 32.2 19.3 12.9
1909 2 899 95 005 50 577 44 428 32.8 17.4 15.3
1910 2 929 92 984 51 007 41 977 31.7 17.4 14.3
1911 2 962 91 238 51 648 39 590 30.8 17.4 13.4
1912 2 998 92 275 51 645 40 630 30.8 17.2 13.5
1913 3 026 87 250 51 876 35 374 28.8 17.1 11.7
1914 3 053 87 577 50 690 36 887 28.7 16.6 12.1
1915 3 083 83 306 52 205 31 101 27.0 16.9 10.1
1916 3 105 79 653 54 577 25 076 25.7 17.6 8.1
1917 3 124 81 046 58 863 22 183 25.9 18.8 7.1
1918 3 125 79 494 95 102 -15 608 25.4 30.4 -5.0
1919 3 117 63 896 62 932 964 20.5 20.2 0.3
1920 3 133 84 714 53 304 31 410 27.0 17.0 10.0
1921 3 170 82 165 47 361 34 804 25.9 14.9 11.0
1922 3 211 80 140 49 180 30 960 25.0 15.3 9.6
1923 3 243 81 961 47 556 34 405 25.3 14.7 10.6
1924 3 272 78 057 53 442 24 615 23.9 16.3 7.5
1925 3 304 78 260 47 493 30 767 23.7 14.4 9.3
1926 3 339 76 875 47 526 29 349 23.0 14.2 8.8
1927 3 368 75 611 51 727 23 884 22.5 15.4 7.1
1928 3 396 77 523 48 713 28 810 22.8 14.3 8.5
1929 3 424 76 011 54 489 21 522 22.2 15.9 6.3
1930 3 449 75 236 48 240 26 996 21.8 14.0 7.8
1931 3 476 71 866 48 968 22 898 20.7 14.1 6.6
1932 3 503 69 352 46 700 22 652 19.8 13.3 6.5
1933 3 526 65 047 47 960 17 087 18.4 13.6 4.8
1934 3 549 67 713 46 318 21 395 19.1 13.1 6.0
1935 3 576 69 942 45 370 24 572 19.6 12.7 6.9
1936 3 601 68 895 49 124 19 771 19.1 13.6 5.5
1937 3 626 72 319 46 466 25 853 19.9 12.8 7.1
1938 3 656 76 695 46 930 29 765 21.0 12.8 8.1
1939 3 686 78 164 52 614 25 550 21.2 14.3 6.9
1940 3 698 65 849 71 846 -5 997 17.8 19.4 -1.6
1941 3 702 89 565 73 334 16 231 24.2 19.8 4.4
1942 3 708 61 672 56 141 5 531 16.6 15.1 1.5
1943 3 721 76 112 49 634 26 478 20.5 13.3 7.1
1944 3 735 79 446 70 570 8 876 21.3 18.9 2.4
1945 3 758 95 758 49 046 46 712 25.5 13.1 12.4
1946 3 806 106 075 44 748 61 327 27.9 11.8 16.1
1947 3 859 108 168 46 053 62 115 28.0 11.9 16.1
1948 3 912 107 759 43 668 64 091 27.5 11.2 16.4
1949 3 963 103 515 44 501 59 014 26.1 11.2 14.9
1950 4 009 98 065 40 681 57 384 24.5 10.1 14.3
1951 4 047 93 063 40 386 52 677 23.0 10.0 13.0
1952 4 090 94 314 39 024 55 290 23.1 9.5 13.5
1953 4 139 90 866 39 925 50 941 22.0 9.6 12.3
1954 4 187 89 845 37 988 51 857 21.5 9.1 12.4
1955 4 235 89 740 39 573 50 167 21.2 9.3 11.8
1956 4 282 88 896 38 713 50 183 20.8 9.0 11.7
1957 4 324 86 985 40 741 46 244 20.1 9.4 10.7
1958 4 360 81 148 38 833 42 315 18.6 8.9 9.7
1959 4 395 83 253 38 827 44 426 18.9 8.8 10.1
1960 4 430 82 129 39 797 42 332 18.5 9.0 9.6
1961 4 461 81 996 40 616 41 380 18.4 9.1 9.3
1962 4 491 81 454 42 889 38 565 18.1 9.5 8.6
1963 4 523 82 251 42 010 40 241 18.2 9.3 8.9
1964 4 549 80 428 42 512 37 916 17.7 9.3 8.3
1965 4 564 77 885 44 473 33 412 17.1 9.7 7.3
1966 4 581 77 697 43 548 34 149 17.0 9.5 7.5
1967 4 606 77 289 43 790 33 499 16.8 9.5 7.3
1968 4 626 73 654 45 013 28 641 15.9 9.7 6.2
1969 4 624 67 450 45 966 21 484 14.6 9.9 4.6
1970 4 606 64 559 44 119 20 440 14.0 9.6 4.4
1971 4 612 61 067 45 876 15 191 13.2 9.9 3.3
1972 4 640 58 864 43 958 14 906 12.7 9.5 3.2
1973 4 666 56 787 43 410 13 377 12.2 9.3 2.9
1974 4 691 62 472 44 676 17 796 13.3 9.5 3.8
1975 4 711 65 719 43 828 21 891 14.0 9.3 4.6
1976 4 726 66 846 44 786 22 060 14.1 9.5 4.7
1977 4 739 65 659 44 065 21 594 13.9 9.3 4.6
1978 4 753 63 983 43 692 20 291 13.5 9.2 4.3
1979 4 765 63 428 43 738 19 690 13.3 9.2 4.1
1980 4 780 63 064 44 398 18 666 13.2 9.3 3.9
1981 4 800 63 469 44 404 19 065 13.2 9.3 4.0
1982 4 827 66 106 43 408 22 698 13.7 9.0 4.7
1983 4 856 66 892 45 388 21 504 13.8 9.3 4.4
1984 4 882 65 076 45 098 19 978 13.3 9.2 4.1
1985 4 902 62 796 48 198 14 598 12.8 9.8 3.0
1986 4 918 60 632 47 135 13 497 12.3 9.6 2.7
1987 4 932 59 827 47 949 11 878 12.1 9.7 2.4
1988 4 946 63 316 49 063 14 253 12.8 9.9 2.9
1989 4 964 63 348 49 110 14 238 12.8 9.9 2.9
1990 4 986 65 549 50 028 15 521 13.1 10.0 3.1
1991 5 014 65 680 49 271 16 409 13.1 9.8 3.3
1992 5 042 66 877 49 523 17 354 13.3 9.8 3.4
1993 5 066 64 826 50 988 13 838 12.8 10.1 2.7
1994 5 088 65 231 48 000 17 231 12.8 9.4 3.4
1995 5 108 63 067 49 280 13 787 12.3 9.6 2.7
1996 5 125 60 723 49 167 11 556 11.8 9.6 2.3
1997 5 140 59 329 49 108 10 221 11.5 9.6 2.0
1998 5 153 57 108 49 283 7 825 11.1 9.6 1.5
1999 5 165 57 574 49 345 8 229 11.1 9.6 1.6
2000 5 176 56 742 49 339 7 403 11.0 9.5 1.4
2001 5 188 56 189 48 550 7 639 10.8 9.4 1.5
2002 5 201 55 555 49 418 6 137 10.7 9.5 1.2
2003 5 213 56 630 48 996 7 634 10.9 9.4 1.5
2004 5 228 57 758 47 600 10 158 11.0 9.1 1.9
2005 5 246 57 745 47 928 9 817 11.0 9.1 1.9
2006 5 266 58 840 48 065 10 775 11.2 9.1 2.0
2007 5 289 58 729 49 077 9 652 11.1 9.3 1.8
2008 5 313 59 350 49 094 10 256 11.2 9.2 1.9
2009 5 339 60 430 49 883 10 547 11.3 9.3 2.0
2010 5 374 60 980 50 887 10 103 11.4 9.5 1.9

Life expectancy at birth

Year Males Females Both sexes
1986 70.5 78.7 74.7
1996 73.0 80.5 76.8
2006 75.8 82.8 79.4
2008 76.3 83.0 79.7
2009 76.5 83.1 79.8

Marriage

Attitudes toward marriage have changed substantially since World War II. Most obvious was the declining marriage rate, which dropped from 8.5 marriages per 1,000 Finns in 1950 to 5.8, in 1984, a decline great enough to mean a drop also in absolute numbers. In 1950 there were 34,000 marriages, while in 1984 only 28,500 were registered, despite a growth in population of 800,000. An explanation for the decline was that there was an unprecedented number of unmarried couples. Since the late 1960s, the practice of cohabitation had become increasingly common, so much so that by the late 1970s most marriages in urban areas grew out of what Finns called "open unions." In the 1980s, it was estimated that about 8 percent of couples who lived together, approximately 200,000 people, did so without benefit of marriage. Partners of such unions usually married because of the arrival of offspring or the acquisition of property. A result of the frequency of cohabitation was that marriages were postponed, and the average age for marriage, which had been falling, began to rise in the 1970s. By 1982 the average marriage age was 24.8 years for women and 26.8 years for men, several years higher for both sexes than had been true a decade earlier.

The overwhelming majority of Finns did marry, however. About 90 percent of the women had been married by the age of forty, and spinsterhood was rare. A shortage of women in rural regions, however, meant that some farmers were forced into bachelorhood.

While the number of marriages was declining, divorce became more common, increasing 250 percent between 1950 and 1980. In 1952 there were 3,500 divorces. The 1960s saw a steady increase in this rate, which averaged about 5,000 divorces a year. A high of 10,191 was reached in 1979; afterwards the divorce rate stabilized at about 9,500 per year during the first half of the 1980s.

A number of factors caused the increased frequency of divorce. One was that an increasingly secularized society viewed marriage, more often than before, as an arrangement that could be ended if it did not satisfy its partners. Another reason was that a gradually expanding welfare system could manage an ever greater portion of the family's traditional tasks, and it made couples less dependent on the institution of marriage. Government provisions for parental leave, child allowances, child care programs, and much improved health and pension plans meant that the family was no longer essential for the care of children and aged relatives. A further cause for weakened family and marital ties was seen in the unsettling effects of the Great Migration and in the economic transformation Finland experienced during the 1960s and the 1970s. The rupture of established social patterns brought uncertainty and an increased potential for conflict into personal relationships.

External Migration

Demographic movement in Finland did not end with the appearance of immigrants from Sweden in the Middle Ages. Finns who left to work in Swedish mines in the sixteenth century began a national tradition, which continued up through the 1970s, of settling in their neighboring country. During the period of tsarist rule, some 100,000 Finns went to Russia, mainly to the St. Petersburg area. Emigration on a large scale began in the second half of the nineteenth century when Finns, along with millions of other Europeans, set out for the United States and Canada. By 1980 Finland had lost an estimated 400,000 of its citizens to these two countries.

A great number of Finns emigrated to Sweden after World War II, drawn by that country's prosperity and proximity. Emigration began slowly, but, during the 1960s and the second half of the 1970s, tens of thousands left each year for their western neighbor. The peak emigration year was 1970, when 41,000 Finns settled in Sweden, which caused Finland's population actually to fall that year. Because many of the migrants later returned to Finland, definite figures cannot be calculated, but all told, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 Finns became permanent residents of Sweden in the postwar period. The overall youthfulness of these emigrants meant that the quality of the work force available to Finnish employers was diminished and that the national birth rate slowed. At one point, every eighth Finnish child was born in Sweden. Finland's Swedish-speaking minority was hard hit by this westward migration; its numbers dropped from 350,000 to about 300,000 between 1950 and 1980. By the 1980s, a strong Finnish economy had brought an end to large-scale migration to Sweden. In fact, the overall population flow was reversed because each year several thousand more Finns returned from Sweden than left for it.

Internal Migration

However significant the long-term effects of external migration on Finnish society may have been, migration within the country had a greater impact--especially the migration which took place between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s, when half the population moved from one part of the country to another. Before World War II, internal migration had first been a centuries-long process of forming settlements ever farther to the north. Later, however, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century with the coming of Finland's tardy industrialization, there was a slow movement from rural regions toward areas in the south where employment could be found.

Postwar internal migration began with the resettlement within Finland of virtually all the inhabitants of the parts of Karelia ceded to the Soviet Union. Somewhat more than 400,000 persons, more than 10 percent of the nation's population, found new homes elsewhere in Finland, often in the less settled regions of the east and the north. In these regions, new land, which they cleared for farming, was provided for the refugees; in more populated areas, property was requisitioned. The sudden influx of these settlers was successfully dealt with in just a few years. One of the effects of rural resettlement was an increase in the number of farms during the postwar years, a unique occurrence for industrialized nations of this period.

It was, however, the postwar economic transformation that caused an even larger movement of people within Finland, a movement known to Finns as the Great Migration. It was a massive population shift from rural areas, especially those of eastern and northeastern Finland, to the urban, industrialized south). People left rural regions because the mechanization of agriculture and the forestry industry had eliminated jobs. The displaced work force went to areas where employment in the expanding industrial and service sectors was available. This movement began in the 1950s, but it was most intense during the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, assuming proportions that in relative terms were unprecedented for a country outside the Third World. The Great Migration left behind rural areas of abandoned farms with reduced and aging populations, and it allowed the creation of a densely populated postindustrial society in the country's south.

The extent of the demographic shift to the south can be shown by the following figures. Between 1951 and 1975, the population registered an increase of 655,000. During this period, the small province of Uusimaa increased its population by 412,000, growing from 670,000 to 1,092,00; three-quarters of this growth was caused by settlers from other provinces. The population increase experienced by four other southern provinces, the Aland Islands, Turku ja Pori, Hame, and Kymi, taken together with that of Uusimaa amounted to 97 percent of the country's total population increase for these years. The population increase of the central and the northern provinces accounted for the remaining 3 percent. Provinces that experienced an actual population loss during these years were in the east and the northeast-Pohjois-Karjala, Mikkeli, and Kuopio.

One way of visualizing the shift to the south would be to draw a line, bowing slightly to the north, between the port cities of Kotka on the Gulf of Finland and Kaskinen on the Gulf of Bothnia. In 1975 the territory to the south of this line would have contained half of Finland's population. Ten years earlier, such a line, drawn farther to the north to mark off perhaps 20 percent more area, would have encompassed half the population. One hundred years earlier, half the population would have been distributed throughout more than twice as much territory. Another indication of the extent to which Finns were located in the south was that by 1980, approximately 90 percent of them lived in the southernmost 41 percent of Finland.

Ethnic minorities & languages

No official statistics are kept on ethnicities. However, statistics of the Finnish population according to language and citizinship are available.

The Finnish and Swedish languages are defined as languages of the state. Additionally, Swedish is an official municipal language in municipalities with significant Swedish-speaking populations. The three Sami languages (North Sami, Inari Sami
Inari Sami
Inari Sámi is a Uralic, Sami language spoken by the Inari Sami of Finland. It has approximately 300 speakers, the majority of whom are middle-aged or older and live in the municipality of Inari. According to the Sami Parliament of Finland 269 persons used Inari Sami as their first language. It is...

, Skolt Sami
Skolt Sami
Skolt Sami is a Uralic, Sami language spoken by approximately 400 speakers in Finland, mainly in Sevettijärvi, and approximately 20–30 speakers of the Njuõˊttjäuˊrr dialect in an area surrounding Lake Lovozero in Russia. Skolt Sami used to also be spoken on the Neiden area of Norway,...

) are official in certain municipalities of Lapland.

Finnish people — Finns — speak the Finnish language
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

, which the dominant language and is spoken almost everywhere in the country. Native Finnish speakers are otherwise recognized as an ethnicity.

Population of mainland Finland (excluding Aland) according to language, 1990-2010 http://pxweb2.stat.fi/Dialog/varval.asp?ma=030_vaerak_tau_102_en&ti=Language+according+to+age+and+gender+by+region+1990+%2D+2010&path=../Database/StatFin/vrm/vaerak/&lang=1&multilang=en
Language 1990 2000 2010
Finnish 4,674,095 4,787,259 4,856,529
Swedish 273,495 267,488 265,982
Sami
Sami languages
Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...

1,734 1,734 1,832
Foreign languages: 24,550 98,858 222,926
Russian 3,884 28,179 54,546
Estonian 1,394 10,153 28,355
Somali 0 6,454 12,985
English 3,518 6,850 12,758
Arabic 1,133 4,875 10,379

The classification of the Swedish-speakers as an ethnicity is controversial. The government only considers the "working language", Finnish or Swedish, of the person, and "bilinguality" has no official standing. Significant populations of Swedish-speakers are found in coastal areas, from Ostrobothnia to the southern coast, and in the archipelago of Åland. Coastal cities, however, are majority Finnish-speaking, with a few small towns as exceptions. There are very few Swedish-speakers in the inland.

Sami

The oldest known inhabitants of Finland are the Sami, who were already settled there when the Finns arrived in the southern part of the country about 2,000 years ago. The Sami were distantly related to the Finns, and both spoke a non-Indo- European language belonging to the Finno-Ugric family of languages. Once present throughout the country, the Sami gradually moved northward under the pressure of the advancing Finns. As they were a nomadic people in a sparsely settled land, the Sami were always able to find new and open territory in which to follow their traditional activities of hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture. By the sixteenth century, most Sami lived in the northern half of the country, and it was during this period that they converted to Christianity. By the nineteenth century, most of them lived in the parts of Lapland that were still their home in the 1980s. The last major shift in Sami settlement was the migration westward of 600 Skolt Sami from the Petsamo region after it was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944. A reminder of their eastern origin was their Orthodox faith; the remaining 85 percent of Finland's Sami were Lutheran.

About 90 percent of Finland's 4,400 Sami lived in the municipalities of Enontekiö, Inari, and Utsjoki, and in the reindeer herding-area of Sodankyla. According to Finnish regulations, anyone who spoke the Lapp language, Sami, or who had a relative who was a Lapp, was registered as a Lapp in census records. Finnish Sami spoke three Sami dialects, but by the late 1980s perhaps only a minority actually had Sami as their first language. Lapp children had the right to instruction in Sami, but there were few qualified instructors or textbooks available. One reason for the scarcity of written material in Sami is that the three dialects spoken in Finland made agreement about a common orthography difficult. Perhaps these shortcomings explained why a 1979 study found the educational level of Sami to be considerably lower than that of other Finns.

Few Finnish Sami actually led the traditional nomadic life pictured in school geography texts and in travel brochures. Although many Sami living in rural regions of Lapland earned some of their livelihood from reindeer herding, it was estimated that Sami owned no more than one-third of Finland's 200,000 reindeer. Only 5 percent of Finnish Sami had the herds of 250 to 300 reindeer needed to live entirely from this kind of work. Most Sami worked at more routine activities, including farming, construction, and service industries such as tourism. Often a variety of jobs and sources of income supported Lapp families, which were, on the average, twice the size of a typical Finnish family. Sami also were aided by old-age pensions and by government welfare, which provided a greater share of their income than it did for Finns as a whole.

There have been many efforts over the years by Finnish authorities to safeguard the Sami' culture and way of life and to ease their entry into modern society. Officials created bodies that dealt with the Lapp minority, or formed committees that studied their situation. An early body was the Society for the Promotion of Lapp Culture, formed in 1932. In 1960 the government created the Advisory Commission on Lapp Affairs. The Sami themselves formed the Samii Litto in 1945 and the Johti Sabmelazzat, a more aggressive organization, in 1968. In 1973 the government arranged for elections every four years to a twentymember Sami Parlamenta that was to advise authorities. On the international level, there was the Nordic Sami Council of 1956, and there has been a regularly occurring regional conference since then that represented--in addition to Finland's Sami-- Norway's 20,000 Sami, Sweden's 10,000 Sami, and the 1,000 to 2,000 Sami who remained in the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

Gypsies

Gypsies, also called Kale and Roma, have been present in Finland since the second half of the sixteenth century. With their unusual dress, unique customs, and specialized trades for earning their livelihood, Gypsies have stood out, and their stay in the country has not been an easy one. They have suffered periodic harassment from the hands of both private citizens and public officials, and the last of the special laws directed against them was repealed only in 1883. Even in the second half of the 1980s, Finland's 5,000 to 6,000 Gypsies remained a distinct group, separated from the general population both by their own choice and by the fears and the prejudices many Finns felt toward them.

Finnish Gypsies, like gypsies elsewhere, chose to live apart from the dominant societal groups. A Gypsy's loyalty was to his or her family and to Gypsies in general. Marriages with non-Gypsies were uncommon, and the Gypsies' own language, spoken as a first language only by a few in the 1980s, was used to keep outsiders away. An individual's place within Gypsy society was largely determined by age and by sex, old males having authority. A highly developed system of values and a code of conduct governed a Gypsy's behavior, and when Gypsy sanctions, violent or not, were imposed, for example via "blood feuds," they had far more meaning than any legal or social sanctions of Finnish society.

Unlike the Lapps, who lived concentrated in a single region, the Gypsies lived throughout Finland. While most Lapps wore ordinary clothing in their everyday life, Gypsies could be identified by their dress; the men generally wore high boots and the women almost always dressed in very full, long velvet skirts. Like most Lapps, however, Gypsies also had largely abandoned a nomadic way of life and had permanent residences. Gypsy men had for centuries worked as horse traders, but they had adapted themselves to postwar Finland by being active as horse breeders and as dealers in cars and scrap metal. Women continued their traditional trades of fortune telling and handicrafts.

Since the 1960s, Finnish authorities have undertaken measures to improve the Gypsies' standard of life. Generous state financial arrangements have improved their housing. Their low educational level (an estimated 20 percent of adult Gypsies could not read) was raised, in part, through more vocational training. A permanent Advisory Commission on Gypsy Affairs was set up in 1968, and in 1970 racial discrimination was outlawed through an addition to the penal code. The law punished blatant acts such as barring Gypsies from restaurants or shops or subjecting them to unusual surveillance by shopkeepers or the police.

Jews

There are about 1,300 Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 in Finland, 800 of whom live in Helsinki and most of the remainder live in Turku. During the period of Swedish rule, Jews had been forbidden to live in Finland. Once the country became part of the Russian Empire, however, Jewish veterans of the tsarist army had the right to settle anywhere they wished within the empire. Although constrained by law to follow certain occupations, mainly those connected with the sale of clothes, the Jewish community in Finland was able to prosper, and 1890 it numbered about 1,000. Finnish independence brought complete civil rights, and during the interwar period there were some 2,000 Jews in Finland, most of them living in urban areas in the south. During World War II, Finnish authorities refused to deliver Jews to the Nazis, and the country's Jewish community survived the war virtually intact. By the 1980s, assimilation and emigration had significantly reduced the size of the community, and it was only with some difficulty that it maintained synagogues, schools, libraries, and other pertinent institutions.

Russians

Russians in Finland
Russians in Finland
Russians in Finland constitute a linguistic and ethnic minority in Finland. About 27,000 people have a citizenship of Russian Federation and Russian is the mother language of about 48,000 people in Finland, which represents about 0.8% of the population.Russians citizens who moved before the Second...

 had come from two major waves. About 5,000 originate from a population that immigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Finland was a grand duchy
Grand duchy
A grand duchy, sometimes referred to as a grand dukedom, is a territory whose head of state is a monarch, either a grand duke or grand duchess.Today Luxembourg is the only remaining grand duchy...

 of Imperial Russia. Another consisted of those who immigrated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. A significant catalyst was the right of return, based on President Koivisto
Mauno Koivisto
Mauno Henrik Koivisto is a Finnish politician who served as the ninth President of Finland from 1982 to 1994. He also served as Prime Minister 1968–1970 and 1979–1982...

's initiative that people of Ingrian
Ingrian Finns
The Ingrian Finns are the Finnish population of Ingria descending from Lutheran Finnish immigrants introduced to the area in the 17th century, when Finland and Ingria were both part of the Swedish Empire...

 ancestry would be allowed to immigrate to Finland.

Muslims

The Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...

 community in Finland is historically smaller than the Jewish community; it numbered only about 900, most of whom were found in Helsinki. Lately immigration has increased the number of Muslims. The Muslims first came to Finland from Turkey in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained there ever since, active in commerce. Like their Jewish counterparts, Finnish Muslims have had difficulty maintaining all the institutions needed by a social group because of their small number. There is now (2011) about 50.000 muslims in Finland.

Religion

At the end of 2009.
  • Evangelical Lutheran 79.9 % (Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland
    Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland
    The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is the national church of Finland. The church professes the Lutheran branch of Christianity, and is a member of the Porvoo Communion....

    , state church
    State church
    State churches are organizational bodies within a Christian denomination which are given official status or operated by a state.State churches are not necessarily national churches in the ethnic sense of the term, but the two concepts may overlap in the case of a nation state where the state...

    )
  • Christian Orthodox
    Eastern Orthodox Church
    The Orthodox Church, officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church, is the second largest Christian denomination in the world, with an estimated 300 million adherents mainly in the countries of Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece,...

     1.1 % (Finnish Orthodox Church
    Finnish Orthodox Church
    The Finnish Orthodox Church is an autonomous Orthodox archdiocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Church has a legal position as a national church in the country, along with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland....

    , second state church)
  • other ca. 1.3 %
  • none ca. 17.7%
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