Ethnic groups in Finland

A variety of ethnic groups have long existed in Finland. Prominent examples include the Swedish speaking minority within the country and the Sami peoples in the north. With modern international migration to Finland, different ethnolinguistics groups populate the country, most prominently in Helsinki.

Finland-Swedes

Further information: Finland Swedes

The largest minority group in Finland is the Swedish-speaking Finns, who in 2018 numbered about 282,300, with all Swedish speakers in the country making a total of 288,400 which is 5.2% of the total population. Municipalities are classified as either monolingual or bilingual with a majority language. Most Swedish-speakers live in unilingual Swedish-speaking municipalities. These municipalities are found in coastal areas, from Ostrobothnia to the southern coast, and in the archipelago of Åland.

Estonians

Further information: Estonians

Estonians are the largest foreign group by nationality. In 2023 there were 52,593 Estonian-background residents in Finland. And Estonian was native language for 0.9% of Finland's total population.

The number of Estonians grew rapidly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Estonian's EU membership. The main reasons were higher salaries and better job opportunities in Finland. More recently, with Estonia's fast development the trend to move to Finland has been losing its popularity.

Iraqis

Further information: Iraqis

As of 2023 there were 29,266 Iraqis in Finland, making them the second largest foreign group by origin and background country after Estonians.

Russians

Russians in Finland 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 under the rule of Imperial Russia. Another consisted of those who immigrated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A significant catalyst was the right of return, based on President Koivisto's initiative that people of Ingrian ancestry would be allowed to immigrate to Finland.

About 30,000 people have citizenship of the Russian Federation (2015) and Russian is the mother language of about 70,000 people in Finland, which represents about 1.3% of the population.

Karelians

In 2011 there were about 30,000 people who identified as Karelian in Finland. About 5,000 of them are fluent or native in the Karelian language but about 25,000 of them can speak Karelian. The Karelians are a closely related ethnic group to Finns. Karelians in Finland mostly live in a diaspora around the country and in North Karelia. All dialects of Karelian are spoken in Finland. Before 2009 Karelian was taught as a dialect of Finnish, but in 2009 it was given official status as a language in Finland.

Sami

Further information: Sami people

The Sami are related to the Finns, and each people speaks a non-Indo-European language belonging to the Uralic 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 16th century, most Sami lived in the northern half of the country, and it was during this period that they converted to Christianity. By the 19th 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.

In 1988, about 90 percent of Finland's 4,400 Sami-speaking citizens lived in the municipalities of Enontekiö, Inari, and Utsjoki, and in the reindeer-herding area of Sodankylä. According to Finnish regulations, anyone who spoke one of the Sami languages, or who had a relative who was a Sami, was registered as a Sami in census records. Finnish Sami spoke three distinct Sami languages, but by the late 1980s perhaps only a minority actually had Sami as their first language. Sami 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 Sami languages spoken in Finland made agreement on 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 Sami 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 Sami 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 Saami-liitto in 1945 and the Johti Sabmelazzat, a more aggressive organization, in 1968. In 1973 the government arranged for elections every four years to a twenty-member Sami Parliaments 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.

Sami languages have an official status in the municipalities of Enontekiö, Inari, and Utsjoki, and in the northern part of Sodankylä since 1992. In 2023, over 60% of the 10,000 Sami in Finland lived outside of this area.

Romani

Further information: Finnish Kale

Romani people, also called Kale and Roma, have been present in Finland since the second half of the 16th century. With their unusual dress, unique customs, and specialized trades for earning their livelihood, Roma 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 Romani 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. There are 13,000-14,000 Romani people in Finland.

Finnish Roma, like Roma elsewhere, chose to live apart from the dominant societal groups. A Roma's loyalty was to his or her family and to their people in general. Marriages with non-Roma were uncommon, and the Roma's 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 Roma 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 Roma's behavior, and when Roma 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 Sami, who lived concentrated in a single region, the Romani lived throughout Finland. While most Sami wore ordinary clothing in their everyday life, Romani 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 Sami, however, Roma also had largely abandoned a nomadic way of life and had permanent residences. Romani 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 Romani's standard of life. Generous state financial arrangements have improved their housing. Their low educational level (an estimated 20 percent of adult Romani 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 Romani from restaurants or shops or subjecting them to unusual surveillance by shopkeepers or the police.

Jews

Further information: History of the Jews in Finland

There are about 1,300 Jews 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 by 1890 it numbered around 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 Third Reich, 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.

Tatars

The community of Finnish Tatars numbers only about 800. The Tatars first came to Finland from the Russian Volga region near Nizni Novgorod's Tatar villages in the mid-19th century; a Tatar presence has continued in Finland in the century and a half since, with Tatars chiefly active in commerce. The Tatars in Finland have significantly integrated into the Finnish society but continue to maintain their different religion, mother tongue, and ethnic culture.