Finland

From The D Archives

The Republic of Finland (Finnish: Suomi, Suomen tasavalta, Swedish: Republiken Finland) is one of the Nordic countries. Situated in Northern Europe, it shares land borders on the Scandinavian Peninsula with Sweden to the west, Russia to the east and Norway to the north while Estonia lies to its south. Finland is bounded by the Baltic Sea with the Gulf of Finland to the south and the Gulf of Bothnia to the west. The Åland Islands, off the south-western coast, are an autonomous, demilitarised administrative province of Finland.

Finland has a population of 5,276,571 people spread over more than 330,000 km² (127,000 sq mi) making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Finland is a democratic republic with a semi-presidential system and parliamentarism. Finland was previously part of the Swedish kingdom and later an autonomous Duchy in the Russian Empire, until it declared its independence on December 6, 1917. Finland is eleventh on the 2006 United Nations Human Development Index and ranked as the sixth happiest nation in the world by an independent scientific study.

The Republic of Finland is a member state of the European Union and the United Nations. Along with Estonian, Hungarian and Maltese, Finnish is one of the few official languages of the European Union that is not of Indo-European origin.