Indo-Uralic hypothesis

Indo-Uralic is a linguistic hypothesis proposing a genealogical family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.

The suggestion of a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic is often credited to the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 (Pedersen 1931:336), though an earlier version was proposed by Finnish linguist Daniel Europaeus in 1853 and 1863. Neither has gained significant support. Since then, the predominant opinion in the linguistic community has remained that the evidence for such a relationship is insufficient to confirm a genetic relationship versus similarity due to language contact. Some linguists have always taken the contrary view e.g. Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Eugene Helimski, Frederik Kortlandt and Alwin Kloekhorst.

The Indo-Uralic hypothesis has been evaluated by recent linguistic data, contradicting previous argued cognates, not finding a genealogical relationship between Uralic and Indo-European.