Regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and other Uralic languages The relationship is most obvious when comparing all Uralic languages together, for then individual idiosyncrasies are averaged out, but here we will just compare Hungarian with Finnish and Estonian (two Finnic languages). One important innovation of Hungarian is the lenition of the stop consonants *p *k in initial position. The third stop inherited from Proto-Uralic, *t, did not undergo such a change. In the middle of words (note that due to the loss of the word final vocals in the Old Hungarian period these are now at the end of the words), Hungarian has also lenited original stops, but in
Finnish language Finnish has only two fricatives in native words, namely and . All other fricatives are recognized as foreign, of which Finnish speakers can usually reliably distinguish and . (The official alphabet includes 'z' [z] and 'ž' [ʒ], but these are rarely used correctly, including by the Swedish-speakers, who also struggle with those sounds.) Palatalization is characteristic of Uralic languages, but Finnish has lost it. However, the Eastern dialects and the Karelian language have redeveloped a system of palatalization. For example, the Karelian word "d'uuri" , with a palatalized , is reflected by "juuri" in Finnish and Savo dialect "vesj" is