Uralic–Yukaghir languages Uralic–Yukaghir languages Uralic–Yukaghir is a proposed language family composed of Uralic and Yukaghir. It is also known as Uralo-Yukaghir. Uralic is a large and diverse family of languages spoken in northern and eastern Europe and northwestern Siberia. Among the better-known Uralic languages are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. Yukaghir is a small family of languages spoken in eastern Siberia. It formerly extended over a much wider area (Collinder 1965:30). It consists of two languages, Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir. The idea that the Uralic and Yukaghir languages are related is not new. It was advanced in passing by Holger Pedersen in
Uralic–Yukaghir languages He lists 35 lexical cognates for Indo-European and Yukaghir. Of these cognates, 27 are common to Indo-European, Uralic, and Yukaghir. Even if one considers Greenberg's listings to be only the result of inspection, as they do not involve the construction of a comprehensive set of sound correspondences, they at least constitute a suggestive preliminary result. However, a large number of Proto-Uralic lexemes are traditionally explained as loanwords from Proto-Indo-European. The figures could also be skewed by the fact that the Indo-European and Uralic languages are much more heavily attested than the Yukaghir ones. However, the impressive figure is the 44