[5] The major modern representatives of the family are Finnish and Estonian, the official languages of their respective nation states.

In addition, since the 1990s, several Finnic-speaking minority groups have emerged to seek recognition for their languages as distinct from the ones they have been considered dialects of in the past.

Meänkieli and Kven are spoken in northern Sweden and Norway respectively and have the legal status of independent minority languages separate from Finnish.

[9] The geographic centre of the maximum divergence between the languages is located east of the Gulf of Finland around Saint Petersburg.

[11] However, Mikko Heikkilä dates the beginning of the diversification (with South Estonian as the first split) rather precisely to about 150 AD, based on loanword evidence (and previous estimates tend to be even older, like Pekka Sammallahti's of 1000–600 BC).

Morphological elements found in the Finnic languages include grammatical case suffixes, verb tempus, mood and person markers (singular and plural, the Finnic languages do not have dual) as well as participles and several infinitive forms, possessive suffixes, clitics and more.

For example, haka + -n → haan, kyky + -n → kyvyn, järki + -n → järjen (Finnish: "pasture", "ability", "intellect").

A more-or-less genetic subdivision can be also determined, based on the relative chronology of sound changes within varieties, which provides a rather different view.

The following grouping follows among others Sammallahti (1977),[20] Viitso (1998), and Kallio (2014):[21] The division between South Estonian and the remaining Finnic varieties has isoglosses that must be very old.

Their position as very early in the relative chronology of Finnic, in part representing archaisms in South Estonian, has been shown by Kallio (2007, 2014).

The genetic classification of the Finnic dialects that can be extracted from Viitso (1998) is: Viitso (2000)[22] surveys 59 isoglosses separating the family into 58 dialect areas (finer division is possible), finding that an unambiguous perimeter can be set up only for South Estonian, Livonian, Votic, and Veps.

(North) Estonian-Votic has been suggested to possibly constitute an actual genetic subgroup (called varyingly Maa by Viitso (1998, 2000) or Central Finnic by Kallio (2014)[21]), though the evidence is weak: almost all innovations shared by Estonian and Votic have also spread to South Estonian and/or Livonian.

Phonetical innovations would include two changes in unstressed syllables: *ej > *ij[citation needed], and *o > ö after front-harmonic vowels.

The most Eastern Finnic group consists of the East Finnish dialects as well as Ingrian, Karelian and Veps; the proto-language of these was likely spoken in the vicinity of Lake Ladoga.