Uralic Languages
The Uralic languages, including both the Finno-Ugrian and the Samoyedic groups, constitute a large family of languages of Europe and Northern Eurasia. Finno-Ugrian languages are spoken mostly in Europe; three of them, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, are major literary and national languages of independent states. All other Finno-Ugrian languages are spoken by people in Russia. Mari (or Cheremis), Mordvin, Udmurt (or Votiak), and Komi (or Zyryene) are spoken by numerous peoples who live between the river Volga and the Ural Mountains.
The closest relatives of Hungarian, however, the Ob'-Ugrian languages, are spoken in the Asiatic part of Russia, east of the Ural Mountains, in the basin of the river Ob'. The two languages of this group are Khanty (or Ostiak) and Mansi (or Vogul). Nowadays Khanty is spoken by about 13,000 people; Mansi has approximately 3,000 speakers. Khanty and Mansi are the titular nationalities of the semiautonomous National Territory of the Khanty and Mansi, which forms part of the Tiumen'skaia Oblast' (province) of Western Siberia.
All Samoyedic languages are spoken by people living in Siberia. This group is commonly subdivided into a Northern and a Southern subgroup. Northern Samoyedic languages are Nganasan (Tawgy-Samoyed), spoken by around 1,000 members of the northernmost nationality of Russia, in fact of all of Asia, on the Taymyr Peninsula; Nenets (Yurak-Samoyed) has around 30,000 speakers north of the Arctic Circle to the west and east of the Ural Mountains, and the obsolescent Enets (Yenisey-Samoyed) is spoken by less than 100 people in a few villages on the bank of the river Yenisey. Southern Samoyed is today represented only by Sel'kup (Ostiak-Samoyed; 1,500 speakers); other Southern Samoyed languages, now extinct, were recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as far south as the Sayan Mountains (Mator, Koibal, Kamass).
The genetic relationship of the Finno-Ugrian languages was established as early as the eighteenth century; the Samoyedic languages were added to the Uralic family by the mid-nineteenth century.
Uralic languages, especially the eastern members of the family, show a marked typological similarity to Altaic languages (e.g., verb-final word order, vowel harmony, lack of word-initial consonant clusters) in the nineteenth century this similarity gave rise to the socalled Ural-Altaic hypothesis, which tried to describe Uralic, together with Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus, as members of one great family of languages. Because more accurate descriptions of these languages became available, and the methods of comparative linguistics were improved, specialists had largely abandoned this view during the twentieth century.
Further Reading
Abondolo, Daniel, ed. (1998) The Uralic Languages. London and New York: Routledge. Collinder, Björn. (1957) Survey of the Uralic Languages.
Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell. Hajdú, Péter. (1992) Introduzione alle lingue Uraliche (Introduction to Uralic languages). Turin, Italy: Rosenberg & Sellier.
Sinor, Denis, ed. (1988) The Uralic Languages: Description,
History, and Foreign Influences. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.
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