Uralic languages
| Uralic | |
|---|---|
| Uralian | |
| Geographic distribution | Central Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Northern Asia |
| Ethnicity | Uralic people |
Native speakers | est. 21.3 million |
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
| Proto-language | Proto-Uralic |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-5 | urj |
| Glottolog | ural1272 |
Distribution of the undisputed branches of the Uralic family in the early 20th century | |
The Uralic languages (/jʊəˈrælɪk/ yoor-AL-ik), sometimes called the Uralian languages (/jʊəˈreɪliən/ yoor-AY-lee-ən), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with over 100,000 speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in European Russia. 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; the Samoyedic languages and the other members of the Ugric languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia.
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 but more accurately refers to a disputed subdivision of the Uralic languages which excludes 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.
Uralic languages are known for their often large number of grammatical cases (such as Finnish with 16 total) and their vowel harmony system. These languages are often also agglutinative, a process where morphemes are systematically strung together to form words.