adjective
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 nounThe 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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