Finland eventually entitle them to qualify for citizenship. Finnish and Swedish are the official languages of Finland. Finnish predominates nationwide while Swedish is spoken in some coastal areas in the west and south and in the autonomous region of Åland. The native language of 89% of the population is Finnish, which is part of the Finnic subgroup of the Uralic languages. The language is one of only four official EU languages not of Indo-European origin. Finnish is closely related to Karelian and Estonian and more remotely to the Sami languages and Hungarian. Swedish is the native language of 5.3% of the
Indo-Uralic languages Whether the "e" placed in parentheses is inherently part of the word is disputed but probable. The "ḷ" in Indo-European "*pḷlu-" represents a vocalic "l", a sound found in English in for instance "little", where it corresponds to the "-le", and "metal", where it corresponds to the "-al". An earlier form of the Indo-European word was probably "*pelu-". An asterisk (*) indicates reconstructed forms. A tilde (~) means 'alternating with'. Indo-Uralic languages Indo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic. A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in