Uralic languages

The Uralic languages ( yoor-AL-ik), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( yoor-AY-lee-ən), are a language family native to northern Eurasia. The largest Uralic languages by number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with over 100,000 speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, all spoken in European Russia. Still smaller minority languages are the Sámi languages of northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; the Samoyedic languages; and Mansi and Khanty of Western Siberia, which are members of the Ugric branch along with Hungarian. The name Uralic derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (Urheimat) hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in Asia Polyglotta (1823). 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 (such as Finnish with 15 total) and their vowel harmony system. These languages are often also agglutinative, a process where morphemes are systematically strung together to form words.