Scandinavia the church and law courts remained Icelandic. The Scandinavian languages are (as a language family) unrelated to Finnish, Estonian and Sami languages, which as Uralic languages are distantly related to Hungarian. Owing to the close proximity, there is still a great deal of borrowing from the Swedish and Norwegian languages in the Finnish and Sami languages. The long history of linguistic influence of Swedish on Finnish is also due to the fact that Finnish, the language of the majority in Finland, was treated as a minority language while Finland was part of Sweden. Finnish-speakers had to learn Swedish in order
Proto-Uralic language Proto-Uralic was an agglutinative nominative–accusative language. Proto-Uralic nouns are reconstructed with at least six noun cases and three numbers, singular, dual and plural. Grammatical gender was not recognized and no Uralic language does so even today. Noun articles were unknown. The plural marker of nouns was *"-t" in final position and *"-j-" in non-final position, as seen in Finnish "talot" and "talojen" ("house" Pl.Nom and Pl.Gen). The dual marker has been reconstructed as *"-k-", but the dual number has been lost in many of the contemporary Uralic languages. The cases were: The cases had only one three-way locative contrast of