This is the adjective that goes with the country Finland. It covers anything that comes from there or belongs to it: Finnish coffee, a Finnish film, the Finnish winter, Finnish grammar. It always starts with a capital F, just like the country. Two points are worth holding on to. A person from Finland is called a Finn, not a Finnish — this word describes things, it does not name the person. And it is spelled almost exactly like finish, meaning to end something, and many speakers say the two the same way; the capital letter and the meaning are what keep them apart.

Like other language names, Finnish is uncountable and takes no a: she speaks Finnish, a book in Finnish, my Finnish is terrible. It keeps its capital letter everywhere in a sentence. Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, so people in Finland and people who speak Finnish are not quite the same group. The source places Finnish in the Finno-Ugric family, which is a different family from English and from Swedish, and that is why its words look unfamiliar even beside those of its neighbours.