European Union in a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue. Most official languages of the EU belong to the Indo-European language family, represented by the Balto-Slavic, the Italic, the Germanic, the Hellenic, and the Celtic branches. Some EU languages however, namely Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian (all three Uralic), Basque (Vasconic) and Maltese (Semitic) do not belong to Indo-European languages. The three official alphabets of the European Union (Cyrillic, Latin, and modern Greek), all derive from the Archaic Greek scripts. Besides the 24 official languages, there are about 150 regional and minority languages, spoken by up to 50 million people. Catalan,
Uralic–Yukaghir languages has vaguely implied the existence of a Uralic–Yukaghir genetic node, and in this he seems to have been followed by Ruhlen and Greenberg, followed in turn by Bomhard. The actual relations of these languages remain to be scrutinized in detail. No work of synthesis of a definitive nature has appeared on this subject. As in several other cases of this sort (see Ural–Altaic languages), that Uralic and Yukaghir are related has been argued for in some detail, but how they are related remains uncertain. It is therefore not surprising that, at the present time (2009), the validity of the Uralic–Yukaghir