Jump to navigation Jump to search Not to be confused with Urali language. Northern Eurasia and in the European Union. The name “Uralic” derives from the fact that the areas where the languages are spoken are found on both sides of the Ural Mountains. Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely estonian finnish relations 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. 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. Hajdu has suggested a homeland in western and northwestern Siberia. Juha Janhunen, and others, suggest a homeland in South-Central Siberia, near Lake Baikal and the Sayan Mountains in the Russian-Mongolian border region. Samoyedic peoples mainly have more N1b-P43 than N1c.
The Siberian origin of Hungarians was long hypothesized by European scholars. The affinity of Hungarian and Finnish was first proposed in the late 17th century. All the main groups of the Uralic languages were already identified here. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, knowledge on the Uralic languages spoken in Russia had remained restricted to scanty observations by travelers. Already Finnish historian Henrik Gabriel Porthan had stressed that further progress would require dedicated field missions. In 1883, the Finno-Ugrian Society was founded in Helsinki on the proposal of Otto Donner, which would lead to Helsinki overtaking St.
Petersburg as the chief northern center of research of the Uralic languages. The Uralic family comprises nine undisputed groups with no consensus classification between them. Some of the proposals are listed in the next section. An agnostic approach treats them as separate branches. Obsolete or native names are displayed in italics. Traces of Finno-Ugric substrata, especially in toponymy, in the northern part of European Russia have been proposed as evidence for even more extinct Uralic languages. All Uralic languages are thought to have descended, through independent processes of language change, from Proto-Uralic.
The internal structure of the Uralic family has been debated since the family was first proposed. A traditional classification of the Uralic languages has existed since the late 19th century. It has enjoyed frequent adaptation in whole or in part in encyclopedias, handbooks, and overviews of the Uralic family. At Donner’s time, the Samoyedic languages were still poorly known, and he was not able to address their position. As they became better known in the early 20th century, they were found to be quite divergent, and they were assumed to have separated already early on. Hajdú describes the Ugric and Volgaic groups as areal units. Little explicit evidence has however been presented in favour of Donner’s model since his original proposal, and numerous alternate schemes have been proposed.
Especially in Finland, there has been a growing tendency to reject the Finno-Ugric intermediate protolanguage. The Finno-Permic grouping still holds some support, though the arrangement of its subgroups is a matter of some dispute. Mordvinic is commonly seen as particularly closely related to or part of Finno-Samic. Within Ugric, uniting Mansi with Hungarian rather than Khanty has been a competing hypothesis to Ob-Ugric. Lexicostatistics has been used in defense of the traditional family tree. The grouping of the four bottom-level branches remains to some degree open to interpretation, with competing models of Finno-Saamic vs.
Viitso finds no evidence for a Finno-Permic grouping. Extending this approach to cover the Samoyedic languages suggests affinity with Ugric, resulting in the aforementioned East Uralic grouping, as it also shares the same sibilant developments. Häkkinen assumes this also happened in Mansi and Samoyedic. A computational phylogenetic study by Honkola, et al. Estimated divergence dates from Honkola, et al. Uralic case system, from which all modern Uralic languages derive their case systems.
