Uralic languages

The Uralic languages are a family of about 20 related languages spoken by circa 20 million people in eastern and northern Europe and in northwestern Asia.

• The best known members belong to the Finno-Ugric subfamily.
• The other subfamily is called Samoyedic.

Merritt Ruhlen (A Guide to the World's Languages, Stanford UP, 1991) adds the Palaeosiberian language, Yukaghir as coordinate with Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric. This theory however is not universally accepted among linguistics.

There is some debate about a possible relationship between the family as a whole and the Altaic languages; a few scholars also consider the Uralic languages to be related to the Indo-European languages, see also Nostratic language.

The most spoken members of the family are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, all of the Finno-Ugric branch.

Some characteristic features of these languages are:

• Extensive use of independent suffixes
• Large set of grammatical cases
• Vowel harmony
• No usage of gender

Family tree

Trace the subtrees in the corresponding articles.

• Finno-Ugric languages
• Samoyedic languages

External links

• Reliable information and links at:
  • http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/fu.html
  • http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/samoyed.html