At the beginning of this year, there were nearly 74,000 speakers of foreign languages were living in the Finnish capital according to figures released by the City of Helsinki’s Urban Facts department on Friday.

That was an increase of some 5300 people from a year earlier.

The foreign languages spoken most widely in the city are Russian, Estonian, Somali and English.

Most of the growth in Helsinki’s population last year came among speakers of languages other than the native languages of Finnish. Swedish and Sámi (the language of Lapland’s small indigenous population).

Nearly half of Finland’s foreign speakers live in the capital region, with about one quarter of the total within Helsinki city limits.

Over the past decade, the number of speakers of foreign languages in the city has soared at an annual rate of around 7.5 percent.

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