Uralic

node · earth · Northern Europe and northwestern Siberia

A family of a few dozen languages running from Hungary and Finland across northern Russia to western Siberia, with Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and the Sámi languages as its most widely spoken members and a long tail of small Siberian languages, several of them severely endangered. It is a securely demonstrated family with rich inflectional morphology, and it matters here for a specific evidential reason: layers of loanwords from Indo-European into Uralic, in particular from Indo-Iranian, can be sorted by which Indo-European sound changes they do and do not show. Because the borrowing languages can be located in time by their own reconstructed development, the loans function as a relative clock linking two families' prehistories, and constrain where and when their speakers were in contact — an argument that has been used both to support and to complicate steppe accounts of Indo-European dispersal. The Uralic homeland is itself disputed, with proposals ranging across the Volga region, the Urals and western Siberia. The older Ural-Altaic hypothesis, which would have joined Uralic to Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, is not accepted.