Finnish Municipalities (Towns and Cities) - Official Names & Majority Language

The table below lists all Finnish municipalities with their official names, i.e. towns and cities in 2001 (changes to the list were made Jan. 1, 2001).

The Finnish Council of State has given a decision about the use of names of municipalities in official contacts with foreign speaking countries. The decision can be used in genealogy too. In contacts with other than Scandinavian countries the name used by the majority of the inhabitants in a municipality should be used. A Finnish American genealogist who applies this decision to his own research will find it much easier to decide which language should be used for names in the database or in a written genealogy.

Right column:

• Finnish - only Finnish is the official language.
• Swedish - only Swedish is the official language.
• Finnish-Swedish - a bilingual community. Both Finnish and Swedish are official languages, but Finnish is the language of the majority of the inhabitants.
• Swedish-Finnish - a bilingual community. Both Swedish and Finnish are official languages, but Swedish is the language of the majority of the inhabitants.

"The use of each language in administration and in the courts of law depends on the linguistic character of the administrative district. Municipalities are either monolingual or bilingual: where the entire population speaks the same mother tongue, or where the linguistic minority is less than 8 %, the municipality is monolingual. But if the linguistic minority consists of over 3,000 people, the municipality is regarded as bilingual, irrespective of the percentage of minority language speakers."

This is a FAQ file from the The Genealogical Society of Finland on Finnish genealogy.
Updated February 18, 2001.