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( Uralic languages)
The Uralic languages (pronounced /j?'ræl?k/) constitute a language family of 39 [1] languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian. Countries that are home to a significant number of speakers of Uralic languages include Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Slovakia. The name "Uralic" refers to the location of the family’s suggested Urheimat (homeland), which is often placed in the vicinity of the Ural mountains. While the internal structure of the Uralic family has been under debate since the family was originally proposed, three subfamilies, Finno-Permic, Ugric and Samoyedic are usually recognized as being distinct from one another. Historically, Finno-Permic and Ugric have tended to be grouped as the Finno-Ugric family, but the genetic similarities between these groups with respect to other members of the Uralic family do not appear to justify this.[citation needed] In any event, all the Uralic languages are thought to have descended, through independent processes of language change, from Proto-Uralic. There is some disagreement in the two views as to whether Proto-Uralic originally split into two or three branches.
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Uralic languages Subcategories
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