Samoyedic languages in the context of "Uralic"

The Altai-Sayan region is an area of Inner Asia proximate to the Altai Mountains and the Sayan Mountains, near to where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together. This region is one of the world centers of temperate plant diversity. Its biological, landscape, historical, cultural and religious diversity is unique. 3,726 species of vascular plants are registered in the region including 700 threatened or rare species, 317 of which are endemic; fauna consists of 680 species, 6% of which are endemic. Its ecosystem is comparatively unchanged since the last ice age, and it is the host of endangered species that include the saiga, nerpa, and snow leopard. It is the focus of ongoing international and regional environmental conservation initiatives.

The area is culturally diverse, with four extant language groups (Mongolic, Turkic, Sinitic and Slavic, and formerly Samoyedic and Yeniseian), and more than 20 indigenous ethnic groups practicing traditional land use systems. There are also a variety of religions including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Tengrism and Shamanism. The region covers more than one million square kilometers, and has a population of between 5 and 6 million inhabitants.

Finno-Ugric (/ˌfɪnoʊˈjuːɡrɪk, -ˈuː-/) is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio. The three most spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric.

The term Finno-Ugric, which originally referred to the entire family, is occasionally used as a synonym for the term Uralic, which includes the Samoyedic languages, as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries. Before the 20th century, the language family might be referred to as Finnish, Ugric, Finno-Hungarian or with a variety of other names. The name Finno-Ugric came into general use in the late 19th or early 20th century.

The Uralic languages (/jʊəˈrælɪk/ yoor-AL-ik), sometimes called the Uralian languages (/jʊəˈreɪliən/ yoor-AY-lee-ən), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with over 100,000 speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; the Samoyedic languages and the other members of the Ugric languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia.

The name Uralic derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (Urheimat) hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in Asia Polyglotta (1823).

The Selkup (Russian: селькупы, romanized: sel'kupy) are a Samoyedic-speaking Uralic ethnic group native to Siberia. They live in the northern parts of Tomsk Oblast, Krasnoyarsk Krai and Tyumen Oblast (with Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug).