Uralic languages spurious fringe-theories by specialists. 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
Uralic–Yukaghir languages the expression, as "*ne e-m mene" 'not be-me go' etc. What made it possible to drop the negative particle was that there was no morphological or syntactic possibility of confusing the expression with the positive verb, which had the form 1s. "*mene-m", 2s. "*mene-t"; 1p. "*mene-me", 2p. "*mene-te" (still preserved without change in Finnish, except for final "*-m" > "-n") 'I go', etc. The dropping of the negative particle is well-attested by such expressions as French "pas", "personne", "rien" and Old Norse "engi", "eigi" (ib.). Pedersen’s argument implies that the Uralic negative verb is very ancient, for three reasons: (1)