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The Uralic language family (Abondolo 1998) must once have been spoken over a
continuous part of northeastern Europe and northwestern Asia, but inroads by other
languages, primarily Indo-European and Turkic, have isolated many of the Uralic branches
and languages from one another geographically. The family falls into two clear subgroups,
Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic. The Samoyedic languages, all with small numbers of speakers,
are spoken along the northern fringe of Eurasia, roughly from the Kanin peninsula to the
Taymyr peninsula.
Finno-Ugric divides in turn into a number of branches: Balto-Finnic (around the
Baltic Sea), Saamic (Lappish) (northern Scandinavia to the Kola peninsula), Volgaic (on the
Volga, although the unity of this branch is now questioned), Permic (northeastern European
Russia), and Ugric (western Siberia and Hungary, though the unity of Ugric is also
questioned). The most widely spoken languages are two Balto-Finnic languages, Finnish and
Estonian, and one of the Ugric languages, Hungarian. It should be noted that the present
location of Hungarian is the result of a long series of migrations, so that Hungarian is now far distant in location from its closest relatives within Finno-Ugric.
Titany answered the question on May 11, 2022 at 09:32