URALIC LANGUAGE

 

Uralic languages, family of more than 20 related languages, all descended from a Proto-Uralic language that existed 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. At its earliest stages, Uralic most probably included the ancestors of the Yukaghir language. The Uralic languages are spoken by more than 25 million people scattered throughout northeastern Europe, northern Asia, and (through immigration) North America. The most demographically important Uralic language is Hungarian, the official language of Hungary. Two other Uralic languages, Estonian (the official language of Estonia) and Finnish (one of two national languages of Finland—the other is Swedish, a Germanic language), are also spoken by millions.

 

Finnic

Finnish

Finnish, together with Swedish (an unrelated North Germanic language), serves as a national language of Finland. It is now spoken by more than 5,000,000 people, including about 95 percent of the inhabitants of Finland plus some 265,000 Finns in North America, Sweden, and Russia. It is also recognized as an official language in Russia’s Karelian region, alongside Russian.

Finnish as the common language of the Finns is not the direct descendant of one of the original Baltic-Finnic dialects; rather, it arose through the interaction of several separate groups in the territory of modern Finland. These included the Häme; the southwestern Finns (originally called Suomi), who appear to be close relatives to the Estonians because they arrived directly from across the Gulf of Finland; and the Karelians, perhaps themselves a blend of Veps and more western Finnic groups. Early Russian chronicles refer to these as jemj, sumj, and korela. The intermixture of the three groups is still reflected in the distribution of the five main modern dialects, which form a western and an eastern area. The western area contains the southwestern dialect (near Turku), Häme (south-central), and a northern dialect subgroup (largely a mixture of the other two plus eastern traits). The eastern area consists of the Savo dialect (perhaps a blend of the original Karelian and Häme dialects) and a southeastern dialect, which strongly resembles Karelian. The Finnish word for their land and their language is suomi, the original meaning of which is uncertain. The first use of the term Finn (fenni) is found in the 1st century ce in Tacitus’s Germania, but this usage is generally considered to refer to the ancestors of the Sami, who have also been labeled Finns at various times. (The province of Norwegian Lappland is called Finnmark.)

 

as, Soyot, and Taigi.

Ugric

Hungarian

Hungarian, the official language of Hungary, remains the primary language of the fertile Carpathian Basin. Bounded by the Carpathian Mountains to the north, east, and southwest, the Hungarian language area is represented by several million speakers outside the boundaries of Hungary—mostly in Romanian Transylvania and in Slovakia. To the south a substantial Hungarian population extends into Croatia and Serbia, and other large Hungarian populations exist in Austria and Ukraine. Hungarian emigrant communities are found in many parts of the world, especially in North America, Israel, and Australia.

The ancestors of the Hungarians, following their separation from the other Ugric tribes, moved south into the steppe region below the Urals. As mounted nomads, in contact with and often in alliance with Turkic tribes, they moved westward, reaching and conquering the sparsely settled Carpathian Basin in the period 895–896. The Hungarians came under the influence of Rome through their first Christian king, Stephen (István) I, in 1001, and the use of Latin for official purposes continued into the 19th century. Following a Hungarian defeat at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, Hungary was occupied by Turkish forces, who were replaced by German Habsburg domination in the late 17th century. Concern for a common literary medium, closely tied with Hungarian nationalism, began in the late 18th century. More recent foreign influences on the language were suppressed and replaced by native words and constructions. The literary form received a broad dialect base, facilitating its use as a national language.

 

Khanty

Khanty (Hanti), previously known as Ostyak (/ˈɒstiæk/),^[3] is the language of the Khant peoples. It is spoken in Khanty–Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous okrugs as well as in Aleksandrovsky and Kargosoksky districts of Tomsk Oblast in Russia. According to the 1994 Salminen and Janhunen study, there were 12,000 Khanty-speaking people in Russia.

The Khanty language has a large number of dialects. The western group includes the Obdorian, Ob, and Irtysh dialects. The eastern group includes the Surgut and Vakh-Vasyugan dialects, which, in turn, are subdivided into thirteen other dialects. All these dialects differ significantly from each other by phonetic, morphological, and lexical features to the extent that the three main "dialects" (northern, southern and eastern) are mutually unintelligible. Thus, based on their significant multifactorial differences, Eastern, Northern and Southern Khanty could be considered separate but closely related languages.

 

The Mansi language (previously, Vogul and also Maansi) is spoken by the Mansi people in Russia along the Ob River and its tributaries, in the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug and Sverdlovsk Oblast. According to the 1989 census, there were 3,184 Mansi-speaking people in Russia.

The base dialect of the Mansi literary language is the Sosva dialect, a representative of the northern dialect. The discussion below is based on the standard language. Fixed word order is typical in Mansi. Adverbials and participles play an important role in sentence construction. The written language was first published in 1868 and was revised using a form of Cyrillic in 1937.

 

 

Mordvin

Mordvin, with some 393,000 speakers (of the 843,000 Mordvins reported in 2010), is the fourth largest Uralic group. The Mordvins are widely scattered over an area between the Oka and Volga rivers, some 200 miles southwest of Moscow. Less than half of their number live within the republic of Mordoviya. Mordvin has two main dialects, Moksha and Erzya, which are sometimes considered separate languages. Both have literary status. Although the Mordvins do not have a common designation for themselves beyond the two dialect names, the name Mordens appears in the 6th-century Getica of Jordanes and is no doubt related to the Permic word for ‘man,’ murt/mort.

Mari

Mari (formerly known as Cheremis) is currently maintained by more than 500,000 speakers (approximately three-fourths of the ethnic Mari). They live primarily in an area north of the Volga between Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod, northeast of the Mordvin area, especially within Mari El republic. Mari El’s three main dialects are the Meadow dialect, used by the largest group north of the Volga and the basic dialect of the republic; Eastern Mari, used by a small group near Ufa, originally speakers of the Meadow dialect who emigrated in the late 18th century; and the Mountain dialect, to the west and on the south bank of the Volga. The Mountain and Meadow dialects both serve as literary languages and differ from each other only in minor details.

The Permic languages

Speakers of the three closely related Permic languages, Udmurt, Komi, and Permyak, number some 600,000. Udmurt is concentrated largely in the vicinity of the lower Kama River just east of Mari El republic, in Udmurtiya. Only very minor dialectal differences are found within Udmurt.

The Komi language area extends into the Nenets and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous okrugs far to the north. Lesser groups of Komi are found as far west as the Kola Peninsula and east of the Urals. Two major dialects are recognized, although the differences are not great: Komi (Zyryan), the largest group, which serves as the literary basis within Komi republic; and Komi-Yazva, spoken by a small, isolated group of Komi to the east of Komi-Permyak autonomous okrug and south of Komi republic. Permyak (also called Komi-Permyak) is spoken in Komi-Permyak, where it has literary status.

Samoyedic

Nenets, with the largest number of speakers of all the Samoyed languages, has grown substantially in size over the past century, from some 9,200 speakers in 1897 to about 22,000 in 2010. Two distinct groups of Nenets differ in dialect as well as in cultural traditions: the Forest Nenets, a smaller, more-concentrated group in the wooded area north of the central Ob River; and the Tundra Nenets, a group whose territory stretches roughly 1,000 miles eastward from the White Sea. These are the “Samoyadj” of Nestor’s chronicles, but little is known of the history of any of the Samoyed peoples until recent centuries.

Nenets alone among the Samoyedic languages can claim a native literature, although both it and Selkup have been in written form since the 1930s. Evidence of the cultural prestige of certain Nenets tribes is seen in the adoption of a Samoyed language by Khanty speakers on the Yamal Peninsula. Enets is spoken by a dwindling group of fewer than a hundred Samoyeds near the mouth of the Yenisey River, just east of the Nenets. Nganasan, spoken by the northernmost Eurasian people, is found north and east of the Enets-speaking group, centring on the Taymyr Peninsula. The number of Nganasans has remained fairly constant, and they seem to have a high degree of ethnic identity, though less than 20 percent of some 900 Nganasans still claimed Nganasan as their mother tongue in the 2010 census.

Selkup, the last of the southern Samoyed languages, is represented by scattered groups of speakers who live on the central West Siberian Plain between the Ob and the Yenisey. Less than half of the 4,200 Selkup recorded in the 2010 census spoke Selkup.

Yukaghir: a probable relative

The Yukaghir, in two small areas of Sakha republic and Magadan oblast (province) of northeastern Siberia, had reached 1,600 by the 2010 census. But at the same time the number of Yukaghir speakers had dwindled to 370.