Finland Country Overview
Where is Finland located? The Parliamentary Republic of Finland is located in Northern Europe and is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe. The capital of Finland is Helsinki. The time zone map of the world divides countries into world time zones along lines of longitude. The allocation to a zone determines the size of the time difference between the respective country and the official world time (also called UTC). The time zone in Finland is different from that in Germany. The time there deviates by 2 hours from the coordinated world clock or is 2 hours ahead of it. As in the rest of Europe, in the summer months (from March to October) Finland puts the time forward one hour to save daylight.
Population Distribution
As of 2023, the latest population of Finland is 5,571,665, based on our calculation of the current data from UN (United Nations).
| Total population | 5,571,665 |
| Population growth rate | 0.30% |
| Birth rate | 10.70 births per 1,000 people |
| Life expectancy | |
| Overall | 79.55 years |
| Men | 76.09 years |
| Women | 83.15 years |
| Age structure | |
| 0-14 years | 16.44% |
| 15-64 years | 62.04% |
| 65 years and above | 21.51% |
| Median age | 42.40 years |
| Gender ratio (Male to Female) | 0.96 |
| Population density | 16.48 residents per km² |
| Urbanization | 60.90% |
| Ethnicities | |
| 90% Finns, 5% Finland-Sweden, 5% others and others; approx. 1800 Sámi (Sami), 800 Finland Tatars – proportion of foreigners in 2015: 4.0% | |
| Religions | |
| Lutherans 89%, Greek Orthodox 1%, no religion 9%, other 1% | |
| Human Development Index (HDI) | 0.925 |
| HDI ranking | 12th out of 194 |
People in Finland
Around 5.5 million people live in Finland in an area that is only slightly smaller than Germany. But 83 million people live in Germany. So Finland is much sparsely populated.
Most of the Finns live in the south of the country. Almost all of the country’s larger cities can be found there. 1.4 million people live in and around Helsinki alone. 85 percent of Finns live in a city.
The Sami people live in the far north of the country. In Finland there are just under 10,000 seeds, 1.8 percent of the population.
Languages in Finland
There are two official languages in Finland: Finnish and Swedish. 92 percent of the population speak Finnish, 6 percent speak Swedish. In the north of Finland the Sami speak their own language, Sami.
Swedish is spoken mainly on the coast in the south and southwest and on the islands of Åland. However, the Swedish they speak here is different from the Swedish they speak in Sweden. Swedish spoken in Finland is therefore called Finland Swedish. It has a different pronunciation and partly a different vocabulary.
Finnish but says the majority of Finns. Finnish is very different from the other Scandinavian languages Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. While these belong to the same language family, Finnish is one of the Finnish-Ugric languages. It is closely related to Estonian and distantly related to Hungarian. Finnish has a lot of vowels. You may know a Finnish word: sauna!
Examples of Finnish
Here are a few examples of Finnish phrases:
Hän ei puhu means: He doesn’t speak.
Minulla on auto means: I have a car.
Tuleeko Anna kesällä? means: is Anna coming in summer?
Would you like to learn to count to 10 in Finnish? It works like this:
1 yksi, 2 kaksi, 3 kolme, 4 neljä, 5 viisi
6 kuusi, 7 seitsemän, 8 kahdeksan, 9 yhdeksän, 10 kymmenen
Religions in Finland
Around 77 percent of Finns belong to the Evangelical Church. All other faiths are minorities. There are only a few Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of free churches and Mormons.
The largest minority is the Orthodox Church of Finland with 1.1 percent of the population. The Orthodox Faith spread in Finland since the Middle Ages and during the Russian rule.