Finno-Ugric language of Finland, spoken by some six million people worldwide, including perhaps 200,000 speakers in North America.
Finnish was an unwritten language until the 16th century, when Mikael Agricola (150957) produced an alphabet book (1543) and a translation of the New Testament (1548); he is regarded as the founder of the Finnish literary language. Finnish was accorded official status in 1809, when Finland entered the Russian Empire after six centuries of Swedish domination. The publication in 1835 of the national folk epic, the Kalevala , created from folk songs collected by Elias Lönnrot , gave increased impetus to the movement to forge a common national language encompassing all dialect areas. Finnish shares with other Baltic Finnic languages a stock of ancient loanwords from Germanic , Baltic , Slavic , and Sami.