Sweden
The official language of Sweden is Swedish, a North Germanic language, related and very similar to Danish and Norwegian, but differing in pronunciation and orthography. Norwegians have little difficulty understanding Swedish, and Danes can also understand it, with slightly more difficulty than Norwegians. The same goes for standard Swedish speakers, who find it far easier to understand Norwegian than Danish. The dialects spoken in Scania, the southernmost part of the country, are influenced by Danish because the region traditionally was a part of Denmark and is nowadays situated closely to it. Sweden Finns are Sweden's largest linguistic minority, comprising about 5% of Sweden's population, and Finnish is recognised as a minority language. Owing to a recent influx of native speakers of Arabic in latter years, the use of Arabic is likely more widespread in the country than that of Finnish. However, no official statistics are kept on language use.
Sweden Finns
People with Finnish heritage comprise a relatively large share of the population of Sweden. In addition to a smaller part of Sweden Finns historically residing in Sweden, there were about 426,000 people in Sweden (4.46% of the total population in 2012) who were either born in Finland or had at least one parent who was born in Finland. Like the Swedish language, the Finnish language has been spoken on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia since the late middle ages. Following military campaigns in Finland by Sweden in the 13th century, Finland gradually came under Swedish rule and made Finns in Finland and Sweden were subjugates of Sweden. Already in the 1400s, a sizeable population of Stockholm spoke Finnish, and around 4% in the 1700s. Finland remained a part of Sweden until 1809 when the peace after the Finnish War handed Finland to the Russian Empire, though leaving Finnish populations on the Swedish side of the Torne river.