Short answers, pulled from the story.
Finnish belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family, making it one of the few European languages that is not Indo-European. Its closest relatives include Estonian, Karelian, and Ingrian, and more distantly Hungarian and the Sami languages.
Finnish gained legal official status in the Finnish Diet of 1863, achieving equal standing with Swedish. It has been one of the two official languages of Finland alongside Swedish, and has been an official language of the European Union since 1995.
Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop, created the first comprehensive writing system for Finnish in the 16th century. He based the orthography on the western dialects and drew on Swedish, German, and Latin models, with the ultimate goal of translating the Bible.
The first known written example of Finnish appears in a German travel journal dating to around 1450. It records a sentence spoken by a Finnish bishop whose name is unknown, translating as "I want to speak Finnish, but I am not able to."
Finnish is spoken by about five million people, most of whom reside in Finland. Around 90.37 percent of Finland's population speak Finnish as their first language, with Swedish speakers making up approximately 5.42 percent.
The most commonly used Finnish word in English, and the one most widely borrowed into other languages, is sauna. Finnish also actively creates new vocabulary through derivational suffixes rather than borrowing, producing words like tietokone for computer and sähköposti for email.