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 Whether the "e" placed in parentheses is inherently part of the word is disputed but probable. The "ḷ" in Indo-European "*pḷlu-" represents a vocalic "l", a sound found in English in for instance "little", where it corresponds to the "-le", and "metal", where it corresponds to the "-al". An earlier form of the Indo-European word was probably "*pelu-". An asterisk (*) indicates reconstructed forms. A tilde (~) means 'alternating with'. Indo-Uralic languages Indo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic. A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in