Uralic languages Uralic languages The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, which are official languages in Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, respectively, and in the European Union. Other Uralic languages with significant numbers of speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, which are officially recognized languages in various regions of Russia. The name "Uralic" derives from the fact that the areas where the languages are spoken are found on both sides
Indo-Uralic languages (< "*pārsa") "pig". In the Indo-European word, *"-os" (> Finno-Ugric *"-as") is a masculine nominative singular ending, but it is quite meaningless in Uralic languages. This shows that the whole word was borrowed as a unit and is not part of the original Uralic vocabulary. (Further details on "*porćas" are given in the Appendix.) One of the most famous borrowings is the Finnish word "kuningas" "king" (< Proto-Finnic "*kuningas"), which was borrowed from Proto-Germanic "*kuningaz". Finnish has been very conservative in retaining the basic structure of the borrowed word, nearly preserving the nominative singular case marker reconstructed for Proto-Germanic masculine