Facts & figures about Finland

The republic of Finland (Suomi in Finnish) is one of the 27 member states of the European Union. It was part of Sweden from the 12th until the 19th century, which explains why (besides Finnish) also Swedish is an official language (spoken by 5% of the population). In the north (Lapland) people speak also Sami.
Finnish is a Finnic language. Another well-known Finnic language is Estonian (and not Hungarian!). It is very unintelligible when you speak only Germanic and Romance languages... I found also a humoristic blog post about the Finnish language: http://linguistlist.org/blog/2013/04/finnish-origins-traced-back-to-klingon/

Its neighbour countries are Russia (in the east), Sweden (in the north) and Norway (more northerly).

It is a relatively young country: it became independent from Soviet Russia in 1917 (the October Revolution). After the second World War, it kept neutrality: it refused to ally with the Western countries or its communistic neighbour, the Soviet Union.

A map of Finland (source: Wikipedia)

Finland is more than 11 times bigger than Belgium. The number of inhabitants is about 5.5 million (Belgium: 11 million). This means that there are only 16 inhabitants/km² (Belgium: 355 inhabitants/km²). Most of the people live in the south of the country. According to Wikipedia, it is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union.