Written by Robert Thomas Harms
Written by Robert Thomas Harms

Uralic languages

Article Free Pass
Written by Robert Thomas Harms

Uralic languages, family of more than 20 related languages, all descended from a Proto-Uralic language that existed 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. At its earliest stages, Uralic most probably included the ancestors of the Yukaghir language. The Uralic languages are spoken by more than 25 million people scattered throughout northeastern Europe, northern Asia, and (through immigration) North America. The most demographically important Uralic language is Hungarian, the official language of Hungary.

Attempts to trace the genealogy of the Uralic languages to periods earlier than Proto-Uralic have been hampered by the great changes in the attested languages, which preserve relatively few features and therefore provide little evidence upon which scholars may base meaningful claims for a more distant relationship. Most commonly mentioned in this respect is a putative connection with the Altaic language family (including Turkic and Mongolian). This hypothetical language group, called Ural-Altaic, is not considered by most scholars to be soundly based. Although the Uralic and Indo-European languages are not generally thought to be related, more speculative studies have suggested a connection between them. Relationship with the Eskimo languages, Dravidian (e.g., Telugu), Japanese, Korean, and various American Indian groups has also been proposed. The most radical of these claims is the massive Dené-Finnish grouping of Morris Swadesh, which encompasses, among others, Sino-Tibetan (e.g., Chinese) and Athabaskan (e.g., Navajo).

The Uralic language family in its current status consists of two related groups of languages, the Finno-Ugric and the Samoyedic, both of which developed from a common ancestor, called Proto-Uralic, that was spoken 7,000 to 10,000 years ago in the general area of the north-central Ural Mountains. At its very earliest stages Uralic most probably included the ancestors of the Yukaghir languages (formerly listed as a Paleo-Siberian stock with no known relatives).

Over the millennia, both Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic branches of Uralic have given rise to more or less divergent subgroups of languages, which nonetheless have retained certain traits from their common source. For example, the degree of similarity between two of the least closely related members of the Finno-Ugric group, Hungarian and Finnish, is comparable to that between English and Russian (which belong to the Indo-European family of languages). The difference between any Finno-Ugric language and any Samoyedic tongue would be even greater. On the other hand, more closely related members of Finno-Ugric, such as Finnish and Estonian, differ in much the same manner as greatly diverse dialects of the same language.

The distribution of Uralic languages

Establishment of the family

Determining the geographic location, material culture, and linguistic characteristics of the earliest stages of Uralic at a period thousands of years prior to any historical record is a problem beset with enormous difficulties; consensus among Uralic scholars is limited to a handful of general hypotheses.

The original homeland of Proto-Uralic is considered to have been in the vicinity of the north-central Urals, possibly centred west of the mountains. Following the dissolution of Uralic, the precursors of the Samoyeds gradually moved northward and eastward into Siberia. The Finno-Ugrians moved to the south and west, to an area close to the confluence of the Kama and Volga rivers.

Shared cognates

Several kinds of indirect evidence support the above supposition. One approach attempts to reconstruct the natural environment of these groups on the basis of shared cognates (related words) for plants, animals, and minerals and on the distribution of these words in the modern languages. For example, cognates designating certain types of spruce are found in all the Uralic languages except Hungarian (Finnish kuusi, Sami [Lapp] guossâ, Mordvin kuz, Komi koz, Khanty kol, Nenets xādy, Selkup kūt). Because the range of this type of fir tree is restricted to more northern climates, it is generally assumed that the widespread consistent association of the name and the tree suggests a period in which Proto-Uralic was spoken within that zone. Several other terms for plants (e.g., Finnish muurain ‘cloudberry’ [Rubus arcticus]), a term for metal (Estonian vask ‘copper,’ Hungarian vas ‘iron,’ Nganasan basa ‘iron’), and a word for ‘reindeer’ (Sami boaƷo) are also consistent with a northern Ural location. Great caution is necessary in such matters, because the association of words and objects also can result from borrowing, perhaps long after the period of Uralic unity; especially such culturally mobile items as “metal” and “reindeer” cannot be traced with certainty to a Proto-Uralic community. The central Volga location of Proto-Finno-Ugric is strongly supported by an abundance of shared terminology dealing with beekeeping, which constitutes a significant part of the culture of this region.

Contacts with unrelated languages

A second approach to determining the location of Proto-Uralic is based on contacts with other, unrelated languages as evidenced by loanwords from one group to the other. Early Finno-Ugric borrowed numerous terms from very early dialects of Indo-European. Though these words are entirely lacking from the Samoyed languages, within the Finno-Ugric division they are shared by the most remotely related members and show the same phonetic relationships as the native Finno-Ugric vocabulary. Examples include agricultural and apicultural terminology (e.g., ‘honey’: Finnish mete, Komi ma, Hungarian méz [compare Indo-European *medhu-]; ‘pig’: Finnish porsas, Komi porś); several numerals (‘hundred’: Finnish sata, Hungarian száz); mineral words (‘salt’: Finnish suola, Komi sol); and the word for ‘orphan’ (Finnish orpo, Hungarian árva). The nature of these borrowings, together with the linguist’s relatively richer knowledge of early Indo-European, supports a southward movement of Proto-Finno-Ugric and also provides some insight into the culture of the Finno-Ugrians.

Take Quiz Add To This Article
Share Stories, photos and video Surprise Me!


Please select the sections you want to print
Select All
MLA style:
"Uralic languages". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
APA style:
Uralic languages. (2014). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/619069/Uralic-languages
Harvard style:
Chicago Manual of Style:
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. "Uralic languages", accessed August 21, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/619069/Uralic-languages.


We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles.
(Please limit to 900 characters)

Or click Continue to submit anonymously: