Languages of Sweden
The Kingdom of Sweden is a nation-state for the Swedish people, and as such, their national language is held in very high regard. Of Sweden's roughly ten million people, almost all speak Swedish as at least a second language, and the majority as a first language (7,825,000, according to SIL's Ethnologue). Swedish is also an official language in Finland where it is spoken by a large number of Swedish-speaking Finns. The language is also spoken to some degree by ethnic Swedes living outside Sweden, for example, just over half a million people of Swedish descent in the United States speak the language, according to Ethnologue.
Norsemen
On occasions Finland is also mentioned as a "Scandinavian country". The Finnish language is not Germanic or even Indo-European, but Finland was for around six centuries a part of Sweden (late 12th century to 1809), and around 6% of the Finnish population still use Swedish as their first language. In the Åland islands Swedish is by far the dominant language, seeing as how the population there are ethnic Swedes but belonging administratively to Finland since 1917. Elsewhere in Finland the share of Swedish-speaking people has been dropping ever since Finland gained independence in 1917, after the Russian Revolution. Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands are also geographically separate from the Scandinavian peninsula. The term "Nordic countries" is therefore used to encompass the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes and Finland.