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 central contention, agreeing with Rédei's views, is that all of the lexical items claimed to be Indo-Uralic can be explained as loans from Indo-European into Uralic (see below for examples). The most common arguments in favour of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as the pronominal roots ("*m-" for first person; "*t-" for second person; "*i-" for third person), case markings (accusative "*-m"; ablative/partitive "*-ta"), interrogative/relative pronouns ("*kʷ-" "who?, which?"; "*y-" "who, which" to signal relative clauses) and a common SOV word order. Other, less obvious correspondences are suggested, such as