A Small Family Spread Very Thin

Uralic is a family of around forty languages with perhaps twenty-five million speakers, most of them accounted for by three national languages, Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. The rest are spoken across a vast and thinly populated band of northern Europe and western Siberia: the Sami languages of Lapland, Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt and Komi in European Russia, and the Ob-Ugric languages Khanty and Mansi, whose closest relative is Hungarian and which are spoken some two thousand miles from it. Several of these have a few hundred speakers left. Hungarian's position is the family's best known puzzle to non-specialists, since it sits in central Europe surrounded by Indo-European languages and is related to none of them; the answer is that the Magyars arrived in the Carpathian basin at the end of the ninth century from the east.

The homeland of the family is disputed and is usually placed somewhere near the Urals or in western Siberia. Reconstruction is helped by the fact that several of these languages remained outside literate empires long enough to be recorded by fieldworkers before heavy borrowing set in. The family also supplies one of the clearest cases anywhere of a relationship that is obvious to specialists and invisible to speakers. Finnish and Hungarian are related, and the relationship is beyond dispute on regular sound correspondences and shared grammar, and no Finn and no Hungarian can hear a word of it. Relatedness is a claim about history, not about mutual intelligibility, and Uralic is where that lesson is usually taught.