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,
Uralic–Yukaghir languages In 1933, the pioneering Indo-Europeanist Holger Pedersen published a comparative study of the verb endings in Uralic and Indo-European. According to Pedersen (1933: §8), the Uralic negative verb was formed from a verb "*e-" meaning 'be' plus the personal endings, which are identical to the personal pronouns. For instance, for the verb "*mene" 'go', the Proto-Uralic forms would have been: 1s. "*e-m mene", 2s. "*e-t mene"; 1p. "*e-me mene", 2p. "*e-te mene" meaning 'I do not go', 'thou dost not go', etc., literally 'be-me go', 'be-thou go', etc. The Uralic negative particle "*ne" 'not' would have originally formed part of