History of the Uralic languages

The Uralic languages sometimes called Uralian languages 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, Northern Sámi, Komi, and Karelian, 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.