Uralic
The Uralic languages form a language family
of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. The
name of the language family references the location of the family's
suggested Urheimat, which is often placed close to the
Ural mountains. Countries that are home to a significant number of
speakers of Uralic languages include: Estonia, Finland,
Hungary, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. The healthiest
Uralic languages, in terms of the number of native speakers and national
identity, are Estonian, Finnish,
and Hungarian.
Family Tree
While the internal structure of the Uralic family has been under debate
since the family was originally proposed, two linguistic genera,
Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic,
are consistantly recognized as being distinct from one another.
Many efforts have been made to identify the relationship between
the Uralic languages and languages generally thought to belong to
the world's other major language families. Perhaps the most
controversial is the relationship between the Uralic languages
and the Altaic languages. Theories that include the Uralic
family as a node in a proposed super-family include the following:
Typology
Structural characteristics generally said to be typical
of Uralic languages include:
