The map Geographical Distribution of the Uralic Languages (Finno-Ugrian Society,
Helsinki 1993) is distributed by the Bookstore Tiedekirja. Price 3 euros +p&p.
The original version of the table, prepared at the Department of Finno-Ugrian
Studies of the University of Helsinki, was included in the map legend and sent
to the Linguist List in September 1993. It was later found out that especially
the numbers of speakers of eastern Saami languages had been grossly
overestimated (cf. especially Ter Saami: formerly 500, now 6). Furthermore, the
languages with a very low number of speakers have been assigned a definite
figure (instead of “very few”). The figures for many languages are still not
quite reliable, and it must be remembered that many of the alleged speakers
actually prefer some other language(s) in their daily life.
Other changes are that Vхro-Seto and Estonian, Karelian and Olonetsian as well
as Komi and Permyak are listed separately, and the idioms subsumed under Mari,
Mansi, Khanty, Enets, Nenets, and Selkup are included in the list, as they are
correctly regarded as separate languages rather than “major dialects”. Also
mentioned for the first time are the outlying dialects Yazva Komi and Csбngу
Hungarian, marked with a + sign.
The table only includes the modern names recommended for current usage. Here is
a checklist of old and new names: Cheremis → Mari; Lappish (or Lapp) → Saami (or
Sбmi, both pronounced sah-mee); Ostyak → Khanty; Ostyak Samoyed → Selkup; Tavgi
(or Tavgi Samoyed) → Nganasan; Vogul → Mansi; Votyak → Udmurt; Yenisey Samoyed →
Enets; Yurak (or Yurak Samoyed) → Nenets; Zyryan → Komi (in the narrow sense
excluding Permyak).
Please also notice that Finnic (rather than “Baltic-Finnic” or the like) is the
name of the group of closely related languages including Finnish, and that the
practice of referring to “Finno-Permian”, i.e. all Uralic languages except
Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty and Samoyed, as Finnic should be regarded as obsolete.
Finno-Ugrian can also be spelled as Finno-Ugric, and both variants are currently
used in literature.