Uralic

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Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

Language family of northwestern Asia and eastern Europe consisting of two branches: the Finno-Ugric languages (about twenty languages, 22 million speakers, Finnish and Hungarian are the best known) and the Samoyedic languages in the Urals (about five languages, 30,000 speakers, largest language Nenets). Yukagiric in northern Siberia (a few hundred speakers) is probably related to the Uralic languages; both are generally combined into a Uralic-Yukagiric language group. A possible relationship to the Altaic languages has been suggested, as well as to Chukchi ( PaleoSiberian) and Indo-European.

The relatedness of the Uralic languages was already established before that of the Indo-European languages (the Finno-Ugric languages in the seventeenth century, the Uralic languages altogether at the end of the eighteenth century by the Hungarian S.Gyarmathi).

Characteristics: typologically quite diverse; most have rich morphology (agglutinating). Well-developed case systems, often with numerous adverbials, e.g. locative case. The verb often agrees with the subject and the object, which can sometimes show focusing. Word order: SOV, sometimes SVO or free word order. Negation expressed by an auxiliary. No true sentence conjunction; instead, numerous infinitive forms for subordinating clauses (converbs). In the smaller languages dual pronominal forms sometimes occur; number marking with nouns is not well developed. A large inventory of vowels; vowel harmony is widespread.

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Bouda, K. 1952 Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der tschuktschischen Sprachgruppe (Tschuktschisch, Korjakisch, Kamtschatkisch). Salamanca.

Collinder, B. 1960. Comparative grammar of the Uralic languages, handbook 3. Stockholm.

——1965a. Hat das Uralische Verwandte? Eine sprachvergleichende Untersuchung. Uppsala.

——1965b.

An introduction to the Uralic languages. Berkeley, CA.

——1969. Survey of the Uralic languages , hand-book 2, 2nd edn. Hamburg.

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Hajdú, P. and D.Hajdú. 1987. Die uralischen Sprachen und Literaturen. Hamburg.

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Collinder, B. 1977. An etymological dictionary of the Uralic languages. handbook 1, 2nd edn. Hamburg.

Reidei, K. 1988–91. Uralisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 3 vols. Wiesbaden.

Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougriénne. Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher.

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