Languages of Sweden
The Sami people (formerly known as Lapps) are a people indigenous to all of northern Scandinavia (see Sápmi (area)) who speak a closely related group of languages usually grouped together under the name "Sami", but at least three separate Sami languages are spoken in Sweden. They are, like Finnish and Meänkieli, Uralic. Prolonged exposure to Germanic-language-speaking neighbors in Sweden and Norway causes them to have a large number of Germanic loanwords not normally found in other Uralic languages like Finnish, Estonian, or Hungarian. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Sami people live in Sweden of whom 9,000 are Sami-language speakers. Worldwide, between 20,000 and 40,000 people speak Sami languages (most Sami now speak Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, or Russian as their first language, depending on the country in which they reside). In Sweden, the largest concentrations of Sami-language-speaking Sami are found in the municipalities of Arjeplog, Gällivare, Jokkmokk and Kiruna, and its immediate neighbourhood.
2011 Finnish parliamentary election
Yet another important issue during the campaign was that of the languages in the country. The status of the Swedish and Russian languages was an hot-button issue. A growing number of people believe that the Swedish language should be abolished as the country's second official language, as only a small percentage of the country use Swedish as their first language and that a large number of government officials do not use Swedish. A report by the Council of Europe stated that the Swedish language's status as Finland's second official language was in danger of being eroded in the longer term because of the officials' poor language skills and the lack of opportunities to study the language. However, the status of Russian was considered to be rising as several municipalities in eastern Finland sought to increase the role of the language at local schools. At the time, Swedish was spoken by 5.42% of the population as their mother tongue, with Russian spoken by 1.01% and the Sami languages spoken by 0.03%.