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
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,