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 vocabulary common to Indo-European and Uralic remains. As examples they advance such comparisons as Proto-Uralic *' (or *') : Proto-Indo-European *', oblique stem *', both meaning 'water', and Proto-Uralic *' (or *') : Proto-Indo-European *', both meaning 'name'. In contrast to *' and *', the phonology of these words shows no sound changes from Indo-European daughter languages such as Indo-Iranian. In contrast to *' and *"", they show no morphological affixes from Indo-European that are absent in Uralic. According to advocates of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, the resulting core of common vocabulary can only be explained by the hypothesis of common