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
Finnish phonology stressed) or "luo" 'towards'. This might make them easier to pronounce as true opening diphthongs (in some accents even wider opening ) and not as centering diphthongs , which are more common in the world's languages. The opening diphthongs come from earlier long mid vowels: . Since that time new long mid vowels have come to the language from various sources. Among the phonological processes operating in Finnish dialects are diphthongization and diphthong reduction. For example, Savo Finnish has the phonemic contrast of vs. vs. instead of standard language contrast of vs. vs. . Finnish, like many other Uralic languages,