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
Finnic languages harmony (lost in Livonian, generally also in Estonian and Veps) is also an important process. Historically, the "erosion" of word-final sounds (strongest in Livonian, Võro and Estonian) may leave a phonemic status to the morphophonological variations caused by the agglutination of the lost suffixes, which results in three phonemic lengths in these languages. The original Uralic palatalization was lost in proto-Finnic, but most of the diverging dialects reacquired it. Palatalization is a part of the Estonian literary language and is an essential feature in Võro, as well as Veps, Karelian, and other eastern Finnic languages. It is also found in