Uralic languages
The Uralic languages (/jʊəˈrælɪk/ yoor-AL-ik; by some called Uralian languages /jʊəˈreɪliən/ yoor-AY-lee-ən) form a language family of 42 languages spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for approximately 60% of speakers), Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; and the Samoyedic languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia.
| Uralic | |
|---|---|
| Finno-Ugric | |
| Geographic distribution | Central Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Northern Asia |
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
| Proto-language | Proto-Uralic |
| Subdivisions | |
| ISO 639-5 | urj |
| Glottolog | ural1272 |
Distribution of the undisputed branches of the Uralic family at the early 20th century | |
The name Uralic derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (Urheimat) hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in Asia Polyglotta (1823).
Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages. Scholars who do not accept the traditional notion that Samoyedic split first from the rest of the Uralic family may treat the terms as synonymous.