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
Northeastern coastal Estonian The characteristics of the dialect group are mostly shared with the Northern group of the Finnic languages. In contrast to , where "-de-" plural and "-si-" preterite are usual, the coastal dialects have "-i-" plural and "-i-" preterite. According to some authors, the 'Finnish-like' features of the coastal Estonian dialects are archaisms, rather than Finnish or Ingrian influence. The Northeastern coastal dialect of Estonian is nowadays alternatively split into two dialects: Coastal dialect and Alutaguse dialect, the former being more closely related with Southern Finnish dialects (note the non-presence of õ [ɤ], also absent in Finnish), Izhor and Votic languages,