Indo-Uralic languages Finnish verb conjugations and pronouns are much more closely related to Indo-European than they would be expected to be by chance; and since borrowing basic grammar is rare, that this would suggest a common origin with Indo-European. (Finnish is preferred for this argument over Saami or Hungarian because it seems to be more conservative, i.e. to have diverged less than the others have from Proto-Uralic. But even then, similar suspicious parallels have been noted between Hungarian and Armenian verb conjugation.) Given that the morphemes involved are short and the comparisons generally concern only a single phoneme, the probability of accidental
Finnic languages East Finnish dialects, and is only missing from West Finnish dialects and Standard Finnish. A special characteristic of the languages is the large number of diphthongs. There are 16 diphthongs in Finnish and 25 in Estonian; at the same time the frequency is greater in Finnish than in Estonian. There are 14 grammatical cases in Estonian and 15 in Finnish, which are denoted by adding a suffix. The Finnic languages form a complex dialect continuum with few clear-cut boundaries. Innovations have often spread through a variety of areas, even after variety-specific changes. A broad twofold conventional division of the Finnic