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,
Indo-Uralic languages borrowed between them, most often from Indo-European languages into Uralic ones. An example of a Uralic word that cannot be original is Finno-Ugric *"śata" "hundred". The Proto-Indo-European form of this word was *"ḱm̥tóm" (compare Latin "centum"), which became *"ćatám" in early Indo-Iranian (reanalyzed as the neuter nominative–accusative singular of an "a" stem > Sanskrit "śatá-", Avestan "sata-"). This is evidence that the word was borrowed into Finno-Ugric from Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan. This borrowing may have occurred in the region north of the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 2100–1800 BC, the approximate floruit of Indo-Iranian (Anthony 2007:371–411). It provides linguistic evidence for the