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 The Uralic negative verb represents a worn-down formation and is therefore presumably an old one. (2) It is built on an obsolete verb ‘to be’. (3) Most decisively, it is found in all branches of Uralic, including Samoyedic. Therefore, it is at least as ancient as Proto-Uralic, that is to say, some 4,500 or 6,500 years old, according to the two prevailing current estimates. The Yukaghir negative verb is unlikely to be borrowed from Uralic, because morphological formations are rarely borrowed. Yet no evidence for the Uralic/Yukaghir negative verb formation is found in the Indo-European languages. It thus seems likely