one of the two branches of the Uralic language family. Finno-Ugric is divided into six language groups: Balto-Finnic (Finnish, Ingrian, Karelian, Ludic, Veps, Votic, Estonian, and Livonian); Lapp; Mordovian (Erzia and Moksha); Mari; Permian (Komi-Zyrian, Komi-Permiak, and Udmurt); and Ugric (Hungarian, Vogul, and Khanty).
The Finno-Ugric languages are spoken in northeastern Europe from Scandinavia to the Urals, a large part of the Volga-Kama region, the middle and lower Ob’ Basin, and part of the Danube Basin. They are spoken by approximately 24 million people (1970, estimate), including approximately 4.5 million people in the USSR (1970 census). Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian possess a writing system and literary tradition that are several centuries old; most of the other Finno-Ugric languages have only recently acquired written forms, and some Balto-Finnic languages have no writing systems.
The systematic appearance of similar features suggests that the Uralic (Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic) languages are related to the Indo-European, Altaic, Dravidian, Yukaghir, and other languages and derive from a Nostratic parent language (seeNOSTRATIC LANGUAGES). According to the prevailing view, Proto-Finno-Ugric separated from Proto-Samoyedic about 6,000 years ago and existed until approximately the end of the third millennium B.C., when the Finno-Permian and Ugric branches divided. It was spoken throughout the Urals and the western Ural Region and, possibly, in some neighboring regions; hypotheses that the Finno-Ugrians originally came from Central Asia and the Volga-Oka and Baltic regions are not supported by recent data. Contacts with Indo-Iranians, which were established during this period, are reflected in several loanwords in the Finno-Ugric languages, such as agricultural terms and some numerals.
In the third and second millennia B.C., the westward migration of the Finno-Permians, which reached as far as the Baltic Sea, was accompanied by gradual isolation of the Balto-Finnic, Mordovian, Mari, and Permian languages, which formed independent groups. The Lapp group developed when the aboriginal population of the European Far North adopted a Finno-Ugric language similar to the Balto-Finnic parent language. It is possible that at an earlier period other Finno-Ugric languages and groups also existed in Eastern Europe, such as the Merja and Murom languages, and were supplanted by the East Slavic languages toward the end of the first millennium A.D.
By the middle of the first millennium B.C., the Ugric parent language was disintegrating, as was the Balto-Finnic parent language in the first centuries A.D and the Permian parent language in the eighth century A.D. Finno-Ugric contacts with Indo-European (Iranian, Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic) and Turkic (Bulgar, Kipchak, and Oghuz) languages played an important role in the independent development of individual Finno-Ugric groups.
The modern Finno-Ugric languages have numerous inflectional and derivational affixes and entire systems of affixes of common origin. There are regular phonetic correspondences between the languages, which have preserved at least 1,000 Proto-Finno-Ugric roots. However, prolonged divergence and areal interactions that dispersed in all directions brought about marked typological differences between the individual Finno-Ugric languages. Features common to all Finno-Ugric languages are few. The languages share an agglutinative structure with prominent inflectional features; inflection is sometimes predominant, as in the Balto-Finnic and Lapp languages. The Finno-Ugric languages also exhibit the absence of gender, the use of postpositions, a highly developed system of verbal aspect, and the prepositive use of the attribute.
Many Finno-Ugric languages have retained other features of the Finno-Ugric parent language, including the absence of voiced consonants and consonant clusters in initial position, the presence of the personal possessive declension of nouns, and the presence of a zero ending in the nominative case; adjectives and numerals used as attributes are indeclinable, and a special auxiliary verb is used to express negation. Many Finno-Ugric languages have also preserved a rich system of impersonal verb forms that are used in constructions analogous in meaning to subordinate clauses. Several Finno-Ugric languages exhibit synharmony, fixed stress (often on the first syllable), opposition between two tones—a high (rising) tone and a low (falling) tone—and a distinction between two types of verb conjugation—subjective-transitive and objective-intransitive.
E. A. KHELIMSKII