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,
Proto-Uralic language Proto-Uralic was an agglutinative nominative–accusative language. Proto-Uralic nouns are reconstructed with at least six noun cases and three numbers, singular, dual and plural. Grammatical gender was not recognized and no Uralic language does so even today. Noun articles were unknown. The plural marker of nouns was *"-t" in final position and *"-j-" in non-final position, as seen in Finnish "talot" and "talojen" ("house" Pl.Nom and Pl.Gen). The dual marker has been reconstructed as *"-k-", but the dual number has been lost in many of the contemporary Uralic languages. The cases were: The cases had only one three-way locative contrast of