Uralic languages in the context of "Latvia"

The Cyrillic script (/sɪˈrɪlɪk/ sih-RI-lik) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.

As of 2019, around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union in 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets.

Hungarians, also known as Magyars, are an ethnic group native to Hungary (Hungarian: Magyarország), who share a common culture, language, history and ancestry. They also have a notable presence in former parts of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarian language belongs to the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, alongside the Khanty and Mansi languages.

There are an estimated 14.5 million ethnic Hungarians and their descendants worldwide, of whom 9.6 million live in today's Hungary. About 2 million Hungarians live in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 and are now parts of Hungary's seven neighbouring countries, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. In addition, significant groups of people with Hungarian ancestry live in various other parts of the world, most of them in the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Chile, Brazil, Australia, and Argentina, and therefore constitute the Hungarian diaspora (Hungarian: magyar diaszpóra).

The Paleo-European languages (sometimes also called Old European languages) are the mostly unknown languages that were spoken in Neolithic (c. 7000 – c. 1700 BC) and Bronze Age Europe (c. 3200 – c. 600 BC) prior to the spread of the Indo-European and Uralic families of languages. The vast majority of modern European populations speak Indo-European languages. However, until the Bronze Age, non-Indo-European languages were predominant across the continent. The speakers of Paleo-European languages gradually assimilated into speech communities dominated by Indo-European speakers, leading to their eventual extinction, except for Basque, which remains the only surviving descendant of a Paleo-European language.

A related term, "Pre-Indo-European", refers more generally to the diverse languages that were spoken in Eurasia before the Indo-European migrations. This category thus includes certain Paleo-European languages (apart from those that were replaced by Uralic languages), along with many others from West, Central, and South Asia.

The Altaic (/ælˈteɪ.ɪk/ ) languages are a sprachbund and rejected proposed language family comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists having included the Koreanic and Japonic families. The proposed Altaic language family is no longer considered valid, as linguistic similarities among Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages are better explained by areal convergence within a convergence zone rather than by a shared genetic lineage, a phenomenon observed cross-linguistically in diverse language families worldwide.

These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has long been rejected by most comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.

Finnish (endonym: suomi [ˈsuo̯mi] or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li]) is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are official minority languages. Kven, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by a minority of Finnish descent.

Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in the sentence. Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows them to be ordered differently. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information structure. Finnish orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, and is phonemic to a great extent. Vowel length and consonant length are distinguished, and there are a range of diphthongs, although vowel harmony limits which diphthongs are possible.

Finns or Finnish people (Finnish: suomalaiset, IPA: [ˈsuo̯mɑlɑi̯set]) are a Baltic Finnic ethnic group native to Finland. Finns are traditionally divided into smaller regional groups that span several countries adjacent to Finland, both those who are native to these countries as well as those who have resettled. Some of these may be classified as separate ethnic groups, rather than subgroups of Finns. These include the Kvens and Forest Finns in Norway, the Tornedalians in Sweden, and the Ingrian Finns in Russia.

Finnish, the language spoken by Finns, is closely related to other Balto-Finnic languages such as Estonian and Karelian. The Finnic languages are a subgroup of the larger Uralic family of languages, which also includes Hungarian. These languages are markedly different from most other languages spoken in Europe, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. Native Finns can also be divided according to dialect into subgroups sometimes called heimo (lit. 'tribe'), although such divisions have become less important due to internal migration.

The Ugric or Ugrian languages (/ˈjuːɡrɪk, ˈuː-/ or /ˈjuːɡriən, ˈuː-/) are a branch of the Uralic language family.

Ugric includes three subgroups: Hungarian, Khanty, and Mansi. The latter two are traditionally considered to be single languages, though they are sometimes considered to be small subdivisions of the Ugric language family due to considerable dialectical differences. A common Proto-Ugric language is posited to have been spoken from the end of the 3rd millennium BC until the first half of the 1st millennium BC, in Western Siberia, east of the southern Ural Mountains. Of the three languages, Khanty and Mansi have sometimes been set apart from Hungarian as Ob-Ugric, though features uniting Mansi and Hungarian in particular are known as well.