Uralic languages


The Uralic languages, sometimes called the Uralian languages, are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with over 100,000 speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in European Russia. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; the Samoyedic languages and the other members of the Ugric languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia.
The name Uralic derives from the family's purported "original homeland" hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in Asia Polyglotta.
Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic but more accurately refers to a disputed subdivision of the Uralic languages which excludes 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.
Uralic languages are known for their often large number of grammatical cases and their vowel harmony system. These languages are often also agglutinative, a process where morphemes are systematically strung together to form words.

Homeland

Proposed homelands of the Proto-Uralic language include:

History of Uralic linguistics

Early attestations

The first plausible mention of a people speaking a Uralic language is in Tacitus's Germania, mentioning the Fenni and two other possibly Uralic tribes living in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. There are many possible earlier mentions, including the Iyrcae described by Herodotus living in what is now European Russia, and the Budini, described by Herodotus as notably red-haired and living in northeast Ukraine and/or adjacent parts of Russia. In the late 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria, the names of settlements east of the Ural. They assumed a connection but did not seek linguistic evidence.

Uralic studies

The affinity of Hungarian and Finnish was first proposed in the late 17th century. Three candidates can be credited for the discovery: the German scholar, the Swedish scholar Georg Stiernhielm, and the Swedish courtier Bengt Skytte. Fogel's unpublished study of the relationship, commissioned by Cosimo III of Tuscany, was clearly the most modern of these: he established several grammatical and lexical parallels between Finnish and Hungarian as well as Sámi. Stiernhielm commented on the similarities of Sámi, Estonian, and Finnish, and also on a few similar words between Finnish and Hungarian. These authors were the first to outline what was to become the classification of the Finno-Ugric, and later Uralic family. This proposal received some of its initial impetus from the fact that these languages, unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, are not part of what is now known as the Indo-European family. In 1717, the Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, of which about 40 are still considered valid. Several early reports comparing Finnish or Hungarian with Mordvin, Mari or Khanty were additionally collected by Gottfried Leibniz and edited by his assistant Johann Georg von Eckhart.
In 1730, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published his book Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia, surveying the geography, peoples and languages of Russia. All the main groups of the Uralic languages were already identified here. Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted. Hungarian intellectuals especially were not interested in the theory and preferred to assume connections with Turkic tribes, an attitude characterized by Merritt Ruhlen as due to "the wild unfettered Romanticism of the epoch". Still, in spite of this hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics traveled with Maximilian Hell to survey the alleged relationship between Hungarian and Sámi, while they were also on a mission to observe the 1769 Venus transit. Sajnovics published his results in 1770, arguing for a relationship based on several grammatical features. In 1799, the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date.
Up to the beginning of the 19th century, knowledge of the Uralic languages spoken in Russia had remained restricted to scanty observations by travelers. Already the Finnish historian Henrik Gabriel Porthan had stressed that further progress would require dedicated field missions. One of the first of these was undertaken by Anders Johan Sjögren, who brought the Vepsians to general knowledge and elucidated in detail the relatedness of Finnish and Komi. Still more extensive were the field research expeditions made in the 1840s by Matthias Castrén and Antal Reguly, who focused especially on the Samoyedic and the Ob-Ugric languages, respectively. Reguly's materials were worked on by the Hungarian linguist and German Josef Budenz, who both supported the Uralic affinity of Hungarian. Budenz was the first scholar to bring this result to popular consciousness in Hungary and to attempt a reconstruction of the Proto-Finno-Ugric grammar and lexicon. Another late-19th-century Hungarian contribution is that of, who published extensive comparative material of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic in the 1890s, and whose work is at the base of today's wide acceptance of the inclusion of Samoyedic as a part of the Uralic family. Meanwhile, in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, a chair for Finnish language and linguistics at the University of Helsinki was created in 1850, first held by Castrén.
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. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the Society hired many scholars to survey the still less-known Uralic languages. Major researchers of this period included Heikki Paasonen, Yrjö Wichmann,, Kustaa Fredrik Karjalainen, Toivo Lehtisalo, and Kai Donner. The vast amounts of data collected on these expeditions would provide over a century's worth of editing work for later generations of Finnish Uralicists.

Classification

The Uralic family comprises nine undisputed groups with no consensus classification between them. An agnostic approach treats them as separate branches.
Obsolete or native names are displayed in italics.Sámi Finnic Mordvinic Mari Permic Hungarian Mansi Khanty Samoyedic
There is also historical evidence of a number of extinct languages of uncertain affiliation:
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.

Traditional classification

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. Doubts about the validity of most or all of the proposed higher-order branchings are becoming more common.
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. Otto Donner's model from 1879 is as follows:Uralic
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. The terminology adopted for this was "Uralic" for the entire family, "Finno-Ugric" for the non-Samoyedic languages. Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic are listed in ISO 639-5 as primary branches of Uralic.
The following table lists nodes of the traditional family tree that are recognized in some overview sources.
YearAuthorFinno-
Ugric		UgricOb-UgricFinno-
Permic		Finno-
Volgaic		Volga-
Finnic		Finno-
Samic
1910Szinnyei
1921T. I. Itkonen
1926Setälä
1962Hajdú
1965Collinder
1966E. Itkonen
1968Austerlitz
1977Voegelin & Voegelin
2002Kulonen
2002Michalove
2007Häkkinen
2007Lehtinen
2007Salminen
2009Janhunen?

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. A recent competing proposal instead unites Ugric and Samoyedic in an "East Uralic" group for which shared innovations can be noted.
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. The term Volgaic was used to denote a branch previously believed to include Mari, Mordvinic and a number of the extinct languages, but it is now obsolete and considered a geographic classification rather than a linguistic one.
Within Ugric, uniting Mansi with Hungarian rather than Khanty has been a competing hypothesis to Ob-Ugric.

Lexical isoglosses

Lexicostatistics has been used in defense of the traditional family tree. A recent re-evaluation of the evidence however fails to find support for Finno-Ugric and Ugric, suggesting four lexically distinct branches.
One alternative proposal for a family tree, with emphasis on the development of numerals, is as follows:
  • Uralic
  • * Samoyedic
  • * Finno-Ugric
  • ** Mansic
  • *** Mansi
  • *** Hungarian
  • ** Finno-Khantic
  • *** Khanty
  • *** Finno-Permic
  • **** Permic
  • **** Finno-Volgaic
  • ***** Mari
  • ***** Finno-Saamic
  • ****** Saamic
  • ****** Finno-Mordvinic
  • ******* Mordvinic
  • ******* Finnic

Phonological isoglosses

Another proposed tree, more divergent from the standard, focusing on consonant isoglosses is presented by Viitso, and refined in Viitso :
  • Finno-Ugric
  • * Saamic–Fennic
  • ** Saamic
  • ** Fennic
  • * Eastern Finno-Ugric
  • **Mordva
  • **
  • *** Mari
  • *** Permian–Ugric
  • **** Permian
  • **** Ugric
  • ***** Hungarian
  • ***** Khanty
  • ***** Mansi
The grouping of the four bottom-level branches remains to some degree open to interpretation, with competing models of Finno-Saamic vs. Eastern Finno-Ugric and Finno-Volgaic vs. Permic-Ugric. 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. A further non-trivial Ugric-Samoyedic isogloss is the reduction *k, *x, *w > ɣ when before *i, and after a vowel, or adjacent to *t, *s, *š, or *ś.
Finno-Ugric consonant developments after Viitso ; Samoyedic changes after Sammallahti
  • *Only present in Nganasan.
  • Note: Proto-Uralic *ś becomes Proto-Sámi *č unless before a consonant, where it becomes *š, which, in the western Sámi languages, is vocalized to *j before a stop.
  • Note: Proto-Mari *s and *š in only reliably stay distinct in the Malmyž dialect of Eastern Mari. Elsewhere, *s usually becomes *š.
  • Note: Proto-Khanty *ɬ in many of the dialects yields *t; Häkkinen assumes this also happened in Mansi and Samoyedic.
The inverse relationship between consonant gradation and medial lenition of stops is noted by Helimski : an original allophonic gradation system between voiceless and voiced stops would have been easily disrupted by a spreading of voicing to previously unvoiced stops as well.

Honkola, et al. (2013)

A computational phylogenetic study by Honkola, et al. classifies the Uralic languages as follows. Estimated divergence dates from Honkola, et al. are also given.

Typology

Structural characteristics generally said to be typical of Uralic languages include:

Grammar

  • extensive use of independent suffixes
  • a large set of grammatical cases marked with agglutinative suffixes, e.g.:
  • * Erzya: 12 cases
  • * Estonian: 14 cases
  • * Finnish: 15 cases
  • * Hungarian: 18 cases
  • * Inari Sámi: 9 cases
  • * Komi: in certain dialects as many as 27 cases
  • * Moksha: 13 cases
  • * Nenets: 7 cases
  • * Northern Sámi: 6 cases
  • * Udmurt: 16 cases
  • * Veps: 24 cases
  • * Northern Mansi: 6 cases
  • * Eastern Mansi: 8 cases
  • unique Uralic case system, from which all modern Uralic languages derive their case systems.
  • * nominative singular has no case suffix.
  • * accusative and genitive suffixes are nasal consonants. Many languages have merged the two.
  • * the Uralic locative suffix *-nA exists in all Uralic languages in various cases, e.g. Hungarian superessive, Finnish essive, Northern Sámi essive, Erzyan inessive, and Nenets locative.
  • a lack of grammatical gender, including one pronoun for both he and she; for example, hän in Finnish, tämä in Votic, tämā or ta in Livonian, tema or ta in Estonian, сійӧ in Komi, ő in Hungarian.
  • negative verb, which exists in many Uralic languages
  • use of postpositions as opposed to prepositions.
  • possessive suffixes
  • * the genitive is also used to express possession in some languages, e.g. Estonian mu koer, colloquial Finnish mun koira, Northern Sámi mu beana 'my dog'. Separate possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns, such as my and your, are rare.
  • dual, in the Samoyedic, Ob-Ugric and Sámi languages and reconstructed for Proto-Uralic
  • plural markers -j and -t have a common origin. Hungarian, however, has -i- before the possessive suffixes and -k elsewhere. The plural marker -k is also used in the Sámi languages, but there is a regular merging of final -k and -t in Sámi, so it can come from either ending.
  • Possessions are expressed by a possessor in the adessive or dative case, the verb "be" and the possessed with or without a possessive suffix. The grammatical subject of the sentence is thus the possessed. In Finnish, for example, the possessor is in the adessive case: "Minulla on kala", literally "At me is fish", i.e. "I have a fish", whereas in Hungarian, the possessor is in the dative case, but appears overtly only if it is contrastive, while the possessed has a possessive ending indicating the number and person of the possessor: " van egy halam", literally " is a fish-my", i.e. " I have a fish".
  • expressions that include a numeral are singular if they refer to things which form a single group, e.g. "négy csomó" in Hungarian, "njeallje čuolmma" in Northern Sámi, "neli sõlme" in Estonian, and "neljä solmua" in Finnish, each of which means "four knots", but the literal approximation is "four knot".

Phonology

  • Vowel harmony: this is present in many but by no means all Uralic languages. It exists in Hungarian and various Baltic-Finnic languages, and is present to some degree elsewhere, such as in Mordvinic, Mari, Eastern Khanty, and Samoyedic. It is lacking in Sámi, Permic, Selkup and standard Estonian, while it does exist in Võro and elsewhere in South Estonian, as well as in Kihnu Island subdialect of North Estonian.
  • Large vowel inventories. For example, some Selkup varieties have over twenty different monophthongs.
  • Palatalization of consonants; in this context, palatalization means a secondary articulation, where the middle of the tongue is tense. For example, pairs like –, or – are contrasted in Hungarian, as in hattyú "swan". Some Sámi languages, for example Skolt Sámi, distinguish three degrees: plain, palatalized, and palatal, where has a primary alveolar articulation, while has a primary palatal articulation. Original Uralic palatalization is phonemic, independent of the following vowel and traceable to the millennia-old Proto-Uralic. It is different from Slavic palatalization, which is of more recent origin. The Finnic languages have lost palatalization, but several of them have reacquired it, so Finnic palatalization was originally dependent on the following vowel and does not correlate to palatalization elsewhere in Uralic.
  • Lack of phonologically contrastive tone.
  • In many Uralic languages, the stress is always on the first syllable, though Nganasan shows penultimate stress, and a number of languages of the central region synchronically exhibit a lexical accent. The Erzya language can vary its stress in words to give specific nuances to sentential meaning.

Lexicography

Basic vocabulary of about 200 words, including body parts, family members, animals, nature objects, basic verbs, basic pronouns, numerals ; derivatives increase the number of common words.

Selected cognates

The following is a very brief selection of cognates in basic vocabulary across the Uralic family, which may serve to give an idea of the sound changes involved. This is not a list of translations: cognates have a common origin, but their meaning may be shifted and loanwords may have replaced them.


Orthographical notes: The hacek denotes postalveolar articulation, while the acute denotes a secondary palatal articulation or, in Hungarian, vowel length. The Finnish letter and the letter in other languages represent the high rounded vowel ; the letters and are the front vowels and.
As is apparent from the list, Finnish is the most conservative of the Uralic languages presented here, with nearly half the words on the list above identical to their Proto-Uralic reconstructions and most of the remainder only having minor changes, such as the conflation of *ś into /s/, or widespread changes such as the loss of *x and alteration of *ï. Finnish has also preserved old Indo-European borrowings relatively unchanged.

Mutual intelligibility

The Estonian philologist Mall Hellam proposed cognate sentences that she asserted to be mutually intelligible among the three most widely spoken Uralic languages: Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian:
  • .
  • .
  • .
  • .
However, linguist Geoffrey Pullum reports that neither Finns nor Hungarians could understand the other language's version of the sentence.

Comparison

No Uralic language has exactly the idealized typological profile of the family. Typological features with varying presence among the modern Uralic language groups include:
FeatureSamoyedicOb-UgricHungarianPermicMariMordvinFinnicSámi
Palatalization
Consonant length
Consonant gradation
Vowel harmony
Grammatical vowel alternation
Dual number
Distinction between
inner and outer local cases
Determinative inflection
Passive voice
Negative verb
SVO word order

Notes:

Proposed relations with other language families

Many relationships between Uralic and other language families have been suggested, but none of these are generally accepted by linguists at the present time: All of the following hypotheses are minority views at the present time in Uralic studies.

Uralic-Yukaghir

The Uralic–Yukaghir hypothesis identifies Uralic and Yukaghir as independent members of a single language family. Diverging views suggest that the similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir languages are due to ancient contact between the proto-languages.

Eskimo-Uralic

The Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis associates Uralic with the Eskimo–Aleut languages. This is an old thesis whose antecedents go back to the 18th century. An important restatement of it was made by Bergsland.

Uralo-Siberian

Uralo-Siberian is an expanded form of the Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis. It associates Uralic with Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo–Aleut. It was propounded by Michael Fortescue in 1998. Michael Fortescue presented new evidence in favor for a connection between Uralic and other Paleo-Siberian languages.

Ural-Altaic

Theories proposing a close relationship with the Altaic languages were formerly popular, based on similarities in vocabulary as well as in grammatical and phonological features, in particular the similarities in the Uralic and Altaic pronouns and the presence of agglutination in both sets of languages, as well as vowel harmony in some. For example, the word for "language" is similar in Estonian and Mongolian. These theories are now generally rejected and most such similarities are attributed to language contact or coincidence.

Indo-Uralic

The Indo-Uralic hypothesis suggests that Uralic and Indo-European are related or, in its stronger form, that they are more closely related than either is to any other language family.

Uralo-Dravidian

The hypothesis that the Dravidian languages display similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting a prolonged period of contact in the past, is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell, Thomas Burrow, Kamil Zvelebil, and Mikhail Andronov. This hypothesis has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages, and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists, such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti. Stefan Georg describes the theory as "outlandish" and "not meriting a second look" even in contrast to hypotheses such as Uralo-Yukaghir or Indo-Uralic.

Nostratic

Nostratic associates Uralic, Indo-European, Altaic, Dravidian, Afroasiatic, and various other language families of Asia. The Nostratic hypothesis was first propounded by Holger Pedersen in 1903 and subsequently revived by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky in the 1960s.

Eurasiatic

The proposed Eurasiatic language family resembles Nostratic in including Uralic, Indo-European, and Altaic, but differs from it in excluding the South Caucasian languages, Dravidian, and Afroasiatic and including Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh, Ainu, and Eskimo–Aleut. It was propounded by Joseph Greenberg in 2000–2002. Similar ideas had earlier been expressed by Heinrich Koppelmann in 1933 and by Björn Collinder in 1965.

Uralic skepticism

The linguist Angela Marcantonio has argued against the validity of several subgroups of the Uralic family, as well against the family itself, claiming that many of the languages are no more closely related to each other than they are to various other Eurasian languages, and that in particular Hungarian is a language isolate.
Marcantonio's proposal has been strongly dismissed by most reviewers as unfounded and methodologically flawed. Problems identified by reviewers include:
  • Misrepresentation of the amount of comparative evidence behind the Uralic family, by arbitrarily ignoring data and mis-counting the number of examples known of various regular sound correspondences
  • After arguing against the proposal of a Ugric subgroup within Uralic, claiming that this would constitute evidence that Hungarian and the Ob-Ugric languages have no relationship at all
  • Excessive focus on criticizing the work of early pioneer studies on the Uralic family, while ignoring newer, more detailed work published in the 20th century
  • Criticizing the evidence for the Uralic family as unsystematic and statistically insignificant, yet freely proposing alternate relationships based on even scarcer and even less systematic evidence.

Other comparisons

Various unorthodox comparisons have been advanced. These are considered at best spurious fringe-theories by specialists:

Comparison

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights : All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Comparison of the text in prominent Uralic languages:
Comparison of the text in other Uralic languages:
  • Northern
  • Northern