Arabic became third largest foreign language in Finland in 2016 surpassing Somali and English, said the Statistics Finland.

A total of 21,783 people speak Arabic as their native language in the country.

According to Statistics Finland’s statistics on the population structure there were 353,993 persons speaking a foreign language as their native language living in Finland in 2016.

Number of persons speaking national languages as their native language went down for the third year in a row

At the end of 2016, Finland's official total population was 5,503,297. In the course of 2016, Finland’s population grew by 15,989 persons.

The number of persons speaking Finnish, Swedish or Sami as their native language went down by good 8,000 persons. The number of foreign-language speakers grew by good 24,000 persons.