How is Finnish related to other languages?

The Finnish language, now spoken by over 5 million people, belongs to the Fenno-Ugric group of the Uralic languages. Uralic (or Uralian) languages are called that way because they are spoken both to the west and to the east of the Ural Mountains and their original area is thought to be somewhere in the vicinity of those mountains.

Estonian and Karelian are close relatives of Finnish, but mutual intelligibility is rather limited. Both Estonian and Karelian have considerable internal variation, and each of them is divided into two or more languages according to some scholars. These languages, in addition to some small languages, are classified as Finnic languages

The Sámi languages, spoken in Northern Finland and Scandinavia, are more remote relatives. Hungarian, the largest of Uralic languages, is very different from Finnish—linguistic comparisons were needed to establish that the languages are related at all. Other Uralic languages, such as Mari, are mostly spoken in various areas in Russia.

The following table of the first three numerals in some Uralian languages illustrates the similarities and differences.

The Uralic family of languages is possibly related to Indo-European languages (such as English, German, Swedish, Latin, Russian, Hindi, etc), but the relationship is highly debatable. The arguments are based on a few similarities which might, according to other scholars, be based on language universals, loanwords, or pure coincidences. Some similarities in vocabularies are caused by relatively new loanwords which were taken into Finnish, largely via Swedish, due to strong cultural contacts (only very few words have gone in the opposite direction).

There are several structural similarities between Uralian and Turkic languages (such as Turkish), for example vowel harmony. However, linguists generally do not regard the undeniable typological similarities as evidence for common origin.