Skip to content
Suomen ja ruotsin kieli Helsingissä

Finnish and Swedish in Helsinki

Published08.01.2024
Helsinki is a bilingual municipality. You can use Finnish and Swedish in all services provided by the City of Helsinki. You can study Finnish and Swedish in integration training, adult education centre courses, language cafés or independently online, for example.

Local information

Select your municipality in order to see information about local services when browsing the site.

Studying Finnish and Swedish

There are many opportunities to study Finnish and Swedish in Helsinki. You can apply to study the language at the University of Helsinki or improve your Finnish language skills at library language cafés. If you are a job seeker, you can study Finnish or Swedish in integration training (kotoutumiskoulutus).

Language courses

Through the Finnishcourses.fi service, you can look for a Finnish course that suits you in Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo or Kauniainen. The best way to find Swedish-language courses is to use the link on the front page of the service. The service is available in Finnish, English and Russian. The courses are open to all and often subject to a charge.

Registrations for the language courses usually take place 2–8 weeks before the beginning of the course. Some of the courses require applications. You can enrol for some courses online.

You can study Finnish and Swedish on adult education centre courses or during vocational studies, for example. Swedish Adult Education Centre Arbis offers many Swedish language courses. You can find the entire course selection of all adult education centres in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area at the address Ilmonet.fi.

If you are a customer of the TE Office, you can also study Finnish or Swedish as part of integration training. Ask your TE Specialist about integration training.

Language cafés and discussion groups

In Helsinki, you can learn Finnish and meet new people at HelMet libraries’ language café and discussion group. You can practise speaking Finnish there, even if you only know a little Finnish. Language cafés are free of charge and you do not need to register. You can ask for more information about language café, for example, at Central Library Oodi.

Link redirects to another websiteHelMet libraries

Language Cafés

National Certificate of Language Proficiency

Helsinki provides the opportunity to obtain the National Certificate of Language Proficiency (YKI) in Finnish or Swedish. The website of the Finnish National Board of Education (Opetushallitus) features a search engine that you can use to check where and when you can obtain the certificate. You need to act quickly because Helsinki has many participants in the YKI certificate.

Read more about the YKI test and other language tests on the InfoFinland page: Official certificate of language proficiency.

Read more about study materials online and tips about language studies on the InfoFinland page: Finnish and Swedish.