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 to their south or west, including possibly their words for "ox", "*gʷou-" (compare English "cow") and "grain", "*bʰars-" (compare English "barley"). In contrast, basic vocabulary – words such as "me", "hand", "water", and "be" – is much less readily borrowed between languages. If Indo-European and Uralic are genetically related, they should show agreements in basic vocabulary, with more agreements if they are closely related, fewer if they are less closely related. Advocates of a genetic relation between Indo-European and Uralic maintain that the borrowings can be filtered out by application of phonological and morphological analysis and that a core of