Abondolo, Daniel; Valijarvi, Riitta-Liisa; (2023) Introduction to the Uralic language, with special reference to Finnish and Hungarian. In: Abondolo, Daniel and Valijarvi, Riitta, (eds.) The Uralic Languages. Routledge: London, UK.

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the rest of the book by rapidly surveying the names of the Uralic languages and their speakers’ numbers, as well as discussing the relative size and age of the family and its nine branches. It outlines the prehistory of these branches and then goes on to sketch in outline the phonological and lexicogrammatical features that the editors think most interesting, problematic, suggestive, and instructive. The reader should come away from reading this chapter with an understanding of the four kinds of information contained in the rest of the book. These are (i) how and which speech sounds are used (vowels and vowel harmony, stress, consonants, and consonant gradation); (ii) how nouns and verbs change their shapes in sentences-case, number, and predestination (in nouns) and tense, mood, and object indexing (in verbs); (iii) how words are put together to make clauses and complex sentences; and (iv) how new words are made (derivation and compounding). The chapter also introduces the more important theoretical conventions that the editors have found most useful in characterizing Uralic languages. To make the chapter accessible to as wide as possible a readership, most of the terminology used is cast in a basic linguistic theory framework.

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