While predominantly Finnish-speaking, Uusimaa has the highest total number of native speakers of Swedish in Finland even at a much lower share than two other regions.

[7] Swedish colonisation of coastal Uusimaa started after the second crusade to Finland in the 13th century.

The colonisation was supported by the Swedish kingdom and the immigrants were provided with grain seeds and cattle.

[10] The names Uusimaa and Nyland, meaning 'new land' in English, derived from the Swedish colonisation era.

The Finnish-language name Uusimaa appears for the first time in 1548 as Wsimaa in the first translation of the New Testament to Finnish by Mikael Agricola.

[12] The coat of arms of the province is Azure, a boat Or between two fesses wavy Argent[citation needed] (a golden boat which is a symbol for the coastal areas, and two silver wavy fesses which are the symbol for rivers.)

[4] The gross domestic product (GDP) of the region was €91.2 billion in 2018, accounting for 38.9% of Finnish economic output.

The most common sectors were health and social services, wholesale and retail trade as well as professional, scientific and technical activities.

On a municipal level, the highest shares of foreign speakers are in Vantaa (26.9%), Espoo (23.6%), Helsinki (19.6%) and Kerava (16.2%).

The most spoken foreign languages are Russian (2.8%), Estonian (1.9%), Arabic (1.4%), Somali (1.2%) and English (1.2%).

Other languages include Albanian, Chinese, Persian, Kurdish, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Thai, Tagalog, German, Nepali, Bengali, French, Romanian, Urdu, Hindi, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Italian, Polish, Tamil, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Swahili, Amharic, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian, Japanese, Dutch, Sinhalese, Tigrinya, Uzbek, Greek, Punjabi, Pashto and Telugu, all with over 1,000 speakers.

[17] In late March 2020, the region of Uusimaa went into lockdown to be isolated from the rest of Finland due to the global COVID-19 pandemic (2020/21).