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.