The Uralic language family is one of the few non-Indo-European language groups in Europe. Also known as Finno-Ugric and Finno-Ugrian, the Uralic language family includes Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian as well as several lesser-known languages. Altogether, the family includes 23 million speakers, but all of the languages besides the three mentioned above are minority languages which lie within Russia and are extremely threatened.

One of the most interesting linguistic features of the family is the complicated case systems these languages employ. Cases refer to the role of a noun within a sentence; English has three: "I", in the nominative, or subject, case, "me", in the accusative, or object, case, and "my", in the genitive, or possessive, case. Latin has six cases. Finnish, in comparison, has fifteen, and Hungarian has twenty-four. These cases are indicated with affixes rather than prepositions.

Another feature of the Uralic languages is vowel harmony, which refers to the tendency of words to feature vowels out of only one of two classes. Affixes are required to match the vowels of the words they are added to. This feature, which is even more pronounced in the Altaic languages, to which Turkish belongs, is thought perhaps to signify that these two families are actually distantly related, although this is a matter of controversy.

The family is divided into the Finno-Ugric branch (also a name used for the family as a whole) and the Samoyedic branch. The Samoyedic languages are used by small groups in western Siberia. They are quite distantly related to the other languages in the family. The Finno-Ugric branch is further divided into the Finnic, or Balto-Finnic languages, including Finnish, Karelian, and Estonian, as well as a few smaller languages. These languages are similar enough that a certain degree of communication can be established between, for instance, speakers of Finnish and Estonian.

The Finno-Ugric branch also includes Saami, or Lappish, a group of languages of minorities in Scandinavia, These ten languages are highly endangered. There are perhaps 50-80,000 speakers altogether. In addition, the Finno-Ugric family includes the Mari, Mordvin, Komi (Permian), and Udmurt languages, all within central Russia. Each of these languages corresponds to a republic within Russia. The Mordvin languages, Erzya and Moksha, are written, although none of these four groups are used in the public sphere. The final group of languages within the family are the Ugric languages, including Hungarian as well as Khanty and Mansi in western Siberia.

Besides Hungarian, Estonian, and Finnish, these languages are generally rural, and associated with the elderly. They are not used in public, nor are students generally educated in the languages. Some of them belong to independent tribal groups but many are simply the languages of small Russian ethnic groups, and they are slowly dying out.

The Finno-Ugrian (also known as Uralic, Finno-Ugric and even Fenno-Ugric) languages are a small language group with some 23 million speakers, notable primarily for sticking out like a sore thumb in otherwise (almost) solidly Indo-European Europe.

Features

Finno-Ugrian languages are highly inflected, meaning that affixes are used instead of prepositions. A not unusual example of literary Finnish:

Kirjoittauduttuamme hotelliin menimme kolmannessa kerroksessa sijaitsevaan huoneeseemme.

registered-after-having-our hotel-into went-we third-in floor-in situated-being-in room-into-our

After having registered into the hotel we went to our room, which was on the third floor.

See the node longest word for a few even more silly examples. Nouns, in particular, have a nearly ridiculous number of cases: Finnish has 15 while Hungarian racks up two dozen. Verbs are inflected by person. Finno-Ugrian languages also employ a rather odd construct called the possessive suffix to indicate ownership, and this has been of prime importance for fleshing out the family tree.

In terms of pronunciation, Finno-Ugrian languages aren't particularly difficult. They are not tonal, usually stress the first syllable in every word, and (with the possible exception of the front vowels) do not feature many unusual sounds. English speakers will, however, have to learn to differentiate between short and long vowels and to articulate unstressed syllables clearly. Then there's consonant gradation and vowel harmony, but I'll skip the in-depth explanations so you won't run away screaming quite yet...

Origin

Anthropologists used to think that all speakers of Finno-Ugrian languages shared a common ancestry and that they had migrated out from somewhere deep in the Ural mountains, but this theory doesn't hold much water these days; there is some evidence that forms of proto-Finnish were spoken around the Baltic Sea as long as 9,000 years ago. It thus seems likely that such proto-Uralic languages were spoken across northern Eurasia, and modern-day Finno-Ugrian languages are evolved remnants.

All Finno-Ugrian languages have borrowed vocabulary very heavily from Indo-European languages, most notably Russian, although Finnish has done most of its (later) borrowing from Swedish. "Truly" Finno-Ugrian words are few and far between -- for example, only 300 are still reckoned to exist in modern Finnish -- and this makes linguists' lives difficult.

Finnic Languages

The two main languages in the Finnic group are Finnish, with some 5 million speakers, and Estonian, with a bit over one million. The two languages are almost, but not quite, mutually intelligible. Karelian (40,000) and Olonetsian (30,000) retain a chance of survival, Vepsian (6,000) and Ludian (5,000) are borderline, while Ingrian, Votian and Livonian only have 20-300 native speakers and are headed for extinction.

Sámi Languages

Sámi (aka Saami) languages are spoken by the people of the same name in Lapland. 10 distinct languages are recognized, although all except North Sámi (aka Davvi Sámi, with some 30,000 speakers) are highly threatened or already existinct.

Mordvin, Mari, Permian groups

In Central Siberia are three related groups of Finno-Ugrian languages, with a bit less than one million speakers each:

Mordvin consists of Erzya (500,000) and Moksha (250,000), and is spoken primarily in the Republic of Mordovia, a part of Russia.

Mari, aka Cheremis, is usually divided into Eastern Mari (500,000+ speakers) and Western Mari (less than 50,000). The Mari also have their own republic, called -- surprise surprise -- the Mari Republic.

The Permian group contains Udmurt aka Votyak with half a million speakers and Komi with 350,000, this sum further subdivided into Permyak and Komi (aka Zyrian). The Udmurts live in the Republic of Udmurtia, while the Komi inhabit the Komi Republic.

Ugric languages

The largest Finno-Ugrian language is Hungarian, which clocks in with over 14 million speakers. Oddly enough, despite their clear linguistic resemblance the other so-called Ob-Ugric languages are all tiny and located far away; Mansi (Vogul) and Khanty (Ostyak), spoken on the Siberian side of the Ural mountains, have around 3,000 and 13,000 speakers respectively.

Samoyed languages

And finally we have the Samoyed languages from northern Siberia near the Kola Peninsula. Nenets is the most sizable group with an estimated 27,000 speakers; Selkup manages 1,500, Nganasan 600, and Enets already has a foot in the grave with grand total of 50 (split among two incompatible dialects at that).

References

http://www.helsinki.fi/~jolaakso/fufaq.html
http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/langua1.html

U*ra"li*an (?), U*ral"ic (?), a.

Of or relating to the Ural Mountains.

 

© Webster 1913.