AI overview
Finno-Ugric is a family of languages spoken across northern Europe and parts of Asia, including Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian among others. It matters because studying these languages helps linguists understand how human languages are related and how populations migrated and settled across Europe over thousands of years.
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Finno-Ugric (/ˌfɪnoʊˈjuːɡrɪk, -ˈuː-/) is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio. The three most spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric.
The term Finno-Ugric, which originally referred to the entire family, is occasionally used as a synonym for the term Uralic, which includes the Samoyedic languages, as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries. Before the 20th century, the language family might be referred to as Finnish, Ugric, Finno-Hungarian or with a variety of other names. The name Finno-Ugric came into general use in the late 19th or early 20th century.