Ugric Peoples - Finno-Ugric Identity

Finno-Ugric Identity

In Finnic- and Ugric-speaking countries such as Finland, Estonia and Hungary, which find themselves surrounded by unrelated tongues, language origins and language history have long been relevant to national identity. At the same time, nationalist ideologies in Hungary have been hostile to historical linguistics for demonstrating the close relationship between Hungarians and the Ugric peoples of central Russia, the Khanty and Mansi subsistence hunters and fishermen. Hungarian nationalists envision Hungarian kinship with more "prestigious" peoples such as the Sumerians, and the discovery of the Finno-Ugric linguistic links was a "psychological blow", as Hungarians had long prided themselves in their supposed Scythian origins, and indeed many Hungarians refuse to accept linguistic findings even today. Thus Finno-Ugric is not an ethnic group based on common culture or identity, but rather a discovery of linguistics:

affinity of the Finno-Ugric peoples is based solely on the linguistic affinity of these nationalities, and often no other fact can be presented to prove it. linguistic affinity is really a proof of cultural affinity, but only of the far distant past when the structure of the culture was far different from that which we investigate today. The common features of primitive culture are often found spread over very extensive areas and in several different language families. —Gustav Ränk, p. 2

The peoples, or rather their linguistic ancestors, have a hypothetical common history based on linguistic reconstruction. However, they do not necessarily share a common ancestry, since entire peoples may change their language. In addition, while the Finnic and Ugric languages are undoubtedly related to each other, there is some debate over whether they are closer to each other than they are to the third branch of Uralic languages, Samoyedic, and thus whether Finno-Ugric is a valid genealogical group, or merely a geographic one. Linguistic ancestry may not necessarily correspond to biological ancestry, and genetic studies have so far been unable to demonstrate a relationship between the various Finno-Ugric peoples.