Uralic

The Uralic languages form a non-Indo-European family native to northern Eurasia, descended from a reconstructed Proto-Uralic whose homeland most likely lay near the Ural Mountains. Its branches stretch from the Baltic and Fennoscandia to the lower Ob and the Arctic tundra, including Finnic, Sámi, Ugric and Samoyedic languages.

The Roman writer Tacitus described a Uralic people, the Fenni, in his Germania of about 98 AD. The Hungarians, an Ugric people who had moved far to the west, founded their Christian kingdom under Stephen I in 1000, when the Latin alphabet displaced the old Hungarian runes.

Fragments of Hungarian survive in the Tihany abbey charter of 1055 and the first continuous text, the Funeral Sermon, dates to the 1190s. The family is typologically marked by agglutinative grammar, vowel harmony and rich systems of grammatical cases.