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
Finnish language "istahtaisinkohan" "I wonder if I should sit down for a while" (from "istua", "to sit, to be seated"): Over the course of many centuries, the Finnish language has borrowed many words from a wide variety of languages, most from neighbouring Indo-European languages. Indeed, some estimates put the core Proto-Uralic vocabulary surviving in Finnish at only around 300 word roots. Owing to the different grammatical, phonological and phonotactic structure of the Finnish language, loanwords from Indo-European have been assimilated. In general, the first loan words into Uralic languages seem to come from very early Indo-European languages. Later important sources have been,