1Relating to or denoting a family of languages spoken from northern Scandinavia to western Siberia, comprising the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic groups.
‘In contrast, the Saami, Finns, and Estonians speak languages belonging to the Uralic family, otherwise spoken across a broad region of northern Asia.’
‘Nenets is part of the Samoyedic group of Uralic languages and has two main dialects: Forest and Tundra.’
‘Their spoken language, Korean, is a Uralic language with similarities to Japanese, Mongolian, Hungarian, and Finnish.’
‘Finnish and Lappish - the language of Finland's small Lapp minority - both are Finno-Ugric languages and are in the Uralic rather than the Indo-European family.’
2Relating to the Ural Mountains or the surrounding areas.
‘But clearly linguistically they are linked to the other Uralic peoples.’
noun
mass noun
The Uralic languages collectively.
‘The evidence for Indo-European, Uralic, Austronesian and so on is overwhelming, and there is no reason not to go deeper.’
‘A number of researchers in the field of Finnish, Uralic and general linguistics (author of this included) published a letter to Helsingin Sanomat, the main Finnish daily newspaper, protesting this nomination.’
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