information:filtering
Language

Population by mother tongue (2023)

The city of Helsinki is officially bilingual, with both Finnish and Swedish as official languages. In 2023, the majority of the population, 75%, spoke Finnish as their mother tongue. There were 36,844 Swedish speakers, or 5.5% of the population. The number of people who speak Sámi, Finland's third official language, is only 68 inhabitants. In Helsinki, 19.6% of the population speak a mother tongue other than Finnish or Swedish. As English and Swedish are compulsory school subjects, functional bilingualism or trilingualism acquired through language studies is not uncommon.

Although few people speak the Sámi languages as their mother tongue, there are 527 people of Sami origin. There are 93 Tatar speakers in Helsinki, almost half of the total number of Tatar speakers in Finland.

Helsinki slang is a regional dialect of the city. Historically, it was a combination of Finnish and Swedish, with influences from Russian and German. Nowadays it has a strong English influence. Today, however, Finnish is the common language of communication between Finnish speakers, Swedish speakers and speakers of other languages (New Finns) in everyday public life between strangers.

The city of Helsinki and the national authorities have specifically targeted Swedish speakers. Knowledge of Finnish is essential in business and is usually a basic requirement in the labour market. Swedish speakers are most concentrated in the southern parts of the city. The district with the most Swedish speakers is Ullanlinna/Ulrikasborg with 2,098 (19.6%), while Byholmen is the only district where Swedish is the majority language (at 82.8%). The number of Swedish speakers decreased every year until 2008, and has increased every year since then. Since 2007, the number of Swedish speakers has increased by 2,351. In 1890, Finnish speakers overtook Swedish speakers to become the majority of the city's population. At that time, the population of Helsinki was 61,530.

The number of people with a foreign mother tongue is expected to reach 196,500 in 2035, representing 26% of the population. 114,000 will speak non-European languages, or 15% of the population. Today, at least 160 different languages are spoken in Helsinki. The most common foreign languages are Russian (3.1%), Somali (2.1%), Arabic (1.5%), English (1.5%) and Estonian (1.4%).