European Union in a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue. Most official languages of the EU belong to the Indo-European language family, represented by the Balto-Slavic, the Italic, the Germanic, the Hellenic, and the Celtic branches. Some EU languages however, namely Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian (all three Uralic), Basque (Vasconic) and Maltese (Semitic) do not belong to Indo-European languages. The three official alphabets of the European Union (Cyrillic, Latin, and modern Greek), all derive from the Archaic Greek scripts. Besides the 24 official languages, there are about 150 regional and minority languages, spoken by up to 50 million people. Catalan,
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,