Concept
The Uralic languages (jʊəˈrælᵻk; sometimes called Uralian languages jʊəˈreiliən) form a language family of 38 languages spoken natively by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Europe (over 99% of the family's speakers) and northern Asia (less than 1%). The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for nearly 60% of speakers), Finnish, and Estonian. Other significant languages with fewer speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, Sami, Komi, and Vepsian, all of which are spoken in northern regions of Scandinavia and the Russian Federation. The name "Uralic" derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (Urheimat) hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains. Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages. Scholars who do not accept the traditional notion that Samoyedic split first from the rest of the Uralic family may treat the terms as synonymous. Proto-Uralic homeland Proposed homelands of the Proto-Uralic language include: The vicinity of the Volga River, west of the Urals, close to the Urheimat of the Indo-European languages, or to the east and southeast of the Urals. Historian Gyula László places its origin in the forest zone between the Oka River and central Poland. E. N. Setälä and M. Zsirai place it between the Volga and Kama Rivers. According to E. Itkonen, the ancestral area extended to the Baltic Sea. Jaakko Häkkinen identifies Proto-Uralic with Eneolithic Garino-Bor (Turbin) culture 3,000–2,500 YBP located in the Lower Kama Basin. P. Hajdu has suggested a homeland in western and northwestern Siberia. Juha Janhunen suggests a homeland in between the Ob and Yenisei drainage areas in Central Siberia. In 2022, a group of scholars, including Janhunen, noted that early Uralic-speakers can be associated with hunter-gatherers in Western Siberia. The spread of Uralic languages may be linked, in part, due to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, but no conclusive evidence exists so far.
