The Research Institute for the Languages of Finland is a governmental linguistic

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 research institute 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...

 geared at studies of 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...

, 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...

 (Cf. Finland Swedish), the Sami languages

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...

, Romani language

Romani language

Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....

, and the Finnish Sign Language

Finnish Sign Language

Finnish Sign Language is the sign language most commonly used in Finland. There are 5000 Finnish deaf who have Finnish Sign Language as a mother tongue...

.

The institute is charged with the standardization of languages used in Finland. In the Swedish language, the institute usually promotes the Swedish usage, with the key aim to prevent the Swedish spoken in Finland from straying too far from its counterpart in Sweden. On the other hand, the institute is the foremost authority on Finnish language planning

Language planning

Language planning is a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure, or acquisition of languages or language variety within a speech community. It is often associated with government planning, but is also used by a variety of non-governmental organizations, such as grass-roots...

 and its recommendations are considered to define the standard Finnish which is used in official communication. In addition to these tasks, the Institute also has an important consulting function in the shaping of Finnish language policy and in choosing toponyms

Toponyms of Finland

The toponyms of Finland result mainly from the legacy left by three linguistic heritages: the Finnish language , the Swedish language and Sami languages . Finland’s place names range from those of unknown or unrecognizable origins to more clearly derivable onomastics...

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External links

• www.kotus.fi — the Institute's web site