Finnish ( suomi (help·info), or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% as of 2006^[update]) and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, a Finnish dialect, is spoken in Northern Norway.

Finnish is the eponymous member of the Finnic language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects the forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence.

Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family of languages. The Finnic group also includes Estonian and other minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea.

Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with the Uralic languages in several respects including:

Several theories exist as to the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages, but the most widely held view is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga. The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar.

Conan Christopher O'Brien (born April 18, 1963) is an American television host, comedian, writer, producer and performer. Since November 2010 he has hosted Conan, a late-night talk show that airs on the American cable television station TBS.

O'Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and raised in an Irish Catholic family. He served as president of the Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, and was a writer for the sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News. After writing for several comedy shows in Los Angeles, he joined the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, and later of The Simpsons. He hosted Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 2009, followed by seven months hosting The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, the only person to serve as the permanent host for both NBC programs.

O'Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston) to Thomas O'Brien, a physician, epidemiologist, and professor of medicine at Harvard, and Ruth O'Brien (née Reardon), an attorney and partner at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray. He is the third of six children. O'Brien's family is Irish Catholic and descends from pre-Civil War era immigrants. In a Late Night episode, O'Brien paid a visit to County Kerry, Ireland, where his ancestors originated.

Hannes Mikael Waldemar "Hasse" Walli was born on 10 February 1948 in Helsinki. His father Aarno Walli was a musician and bandleader, his mother Anne-Marie Strandberg a singer. Hasse Walli was about ten years old when he started playing drums. He drummed in various bands in early 1960s such as The Islanders, The Electric Five and Nameless. Gradually Walli switched from drums to electric guitar. After Nameless had split, Walli started as a solo guitarist in The Typhoons. The Typhoons split when its members had to join the obligatory military service.

In spring 1966 Walli can be said to have finally launched his professional musical career as guitarist when he started playing with Jormas, a band which was extremely popular not only in Finland but in the rest of Scandinavia too. During the seven months Hasse Walli spent in Jormas, they toured expansively Finland, Sweden and Denmark, Walli also appearing on the band's album and singles. Again, Jormas split too when its members had to join military service; Walli finding soon himself doing a brief stint in The Frankies of Johnny Liebkind. However, soon Hasse Walli became frustrated in having to play soft pop, when the rawer sounds of The Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (which especially inspired Walli) started to make waves in the mid-60s rock scene.