Indo-Uralic Languages

Indo-Uralic Languages

Indo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.

A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 (Pedersen 1931:336) but was received with little enthusiasm. Since then, the predominant opinion in the linguistic community has remained that the evidence for such a relationship is insufficient. However, quite a few prominent linguists have always taken the contrary view (e.g. Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Eugene Helimski and Gert Klingenschmitt).

There are two distinct questions here (cf. Greenberg 2005:325):

1. Are Indo-European and Uralic genetically related?
2. If so, do Indo-European and Uralic constitute a valid genetic node? The Eurasiatic and Nostratic hypotheses both consider Indo-European and Uralic (or Uralic–Yukaghir) to be genetically related. However, the Indo-Uralic hypothesis in the strict sense is distinct from this: it maintains that Indo-European and Uralic have an especially close genetic relationship, and does not necessarily include assertions that Indo-European and Uralic are related to any other language families.

At the same time, most of the supporters of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic have also supported their relationship to additional language families, leading some to regard Indo-Uralic as a subset of the larger Nostratic hypothesis.

This article focuses on the first question, genetic relationship, and only treats incidentally of the second question, possible relation to other language families.