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
Indo-Uralic languages central contention, agreeing with Rédei's views, is that all of the lexical items claimed to be Indo-Uralic can be explained as loans from Indo-European into Uralic (see below for examples). The most common arguments in favour of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as the pronominal roots ("*m-" for first person; "*t-" for second person; "*i-" for third person), case markings (accusative "*-m"; ablative/partitive "*-ta"), interrogative/relative pronouns ("*kʷ-" "who?, which?"; "*y-" "who, which" to signal relative clauses) and a common SOV word order. Other, less obvious correspondences are suggested, such as