Finnish belongs to the Uralic family, not the Indo-European family that covers most of Europe, which is why it looks so unlike Swedish or English. Its nearest major relative is Estonian; Hungarian is a far more distant cousin. Finnish is one of Finland's two official languages, alongside Swedish, and has around 5.5 million speakers. It is also a recognised minority language in Sweden. The grammar is agglutinative, stacking suffixes onto words, with around fifteen grammatical cases doing the work that prepositions do in English; there are no articles, no grammatical gender, and a single pronoun covers both he and she. Vowel harmony governs which vowels can share a word. Finnish spelling is admirably regular, each letter matching one sound, and the language is written in the Latin alphabet.
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