Student nations or simply nations ( meaning "being born") are regional corporations of students at a university. Once widespread across Europe in medieval times, they are now largely restricted to the older universities of Sweden and Finland, in part because of the violent conflicts between the nations in university towns in other countries. Medieval universities were large metropolitan centres with students from many different domestic and foreign regions. Students who were born within the same region usually spoke the same language, expected to be ruled by their own familiar laws, and therefore joined together to form the nations. The most similar comparison in the Anglo-world to the nation system is in the collegiate system of older British universities or fraternities at American universities; however, both of these comparisons are imperfect. In Portugal and Brazil, there are fraternities called , but this has nothing to do with the natio original concept of nations (they are created for lodgement purposes).