 The region's five sovereign states and three autonomous regions share much common history as well as common traits in their respective societies, such as political systems and the Nordic model.Politically, Nordic countries do not form a separate entity, but they co-operate in the Nordic Council.Linguistically, the area is heterogeneous, with three unrelated language groups, the North Germanic branch of Indo-European languages and the Finnic and Sami branches of Uralic languages as well as the Eskimo–Aleut language Greenlandic spoken in Greenland.