Part of the reason for the decline is the country’s aging population and declining birth rate.
The number of people who speak Finnish, Swedish and Sámi as their mother tongue has dropped below five million, according to Statistic Finland.
The agency noted that preliminary data shows that Finland’s population stood at approximately 5.65 million at the end of March.
People who natively speak either Finnish, Swedish or Sámi accounted for 88 percent of the population, according to the number-crunching agency.
The number of people who speak those languages as their mother tongue first exceeded the five million mark in 1992. The figure peaked in 2013 when the group grew to nearly 5.2 million people.
However, their numbers began to decline in 2014.
The reason, according to the agency, is due to factors including the population’s age and a declining birth rate.
Earlier this month, Statistics Finland reported that the number of foreign language speakers in the country surpassed 600,000. The country’s group of largest foreign-language speakers is Russian, while the second-largest group speaks Estonian.
