Product Description

The Uralic Languages form a language family of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. The name of the language family refers to the location of the family's suggested Urheimat (homeland), which is often placed close to the Ural mountains. Countries that are home to a significant number of speakers of Uralic languages include: Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Romania, Russia, the Serbian province of Vojvodina, and Sweden. The healthiest Uralic languages, in terms of the number of native speakers and national identity, are Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian.
Abondolo takes 18 of the major languages, and focuses on structure, history and development.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #921330 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 619 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent, but not for the impoverished scholar
For linguists interested in Uralic languages, this is an outstanding reference with essays written mostly by top scholars in the field--Pekka Sammallahti for Saami might be singled out in particular. Unfortunately, Routledge has priced the book staggeringly high. No scholar with just a casual interest in the field and without very deep pockets could afford it. Consult it in the library--if you can get your library to buy it. The only flaw I find with _The Uralic Languages_ is the lack of a chart setting out the traditional Uralicists' phonetic transcription system. Knowledge of this system is indispensable for reading older Uralic scholarship, and a survey like this would have been a good place to include it.

Great descriptions, if you study the Uralic branch.
Routledge has a great line of language family books, which are very well written, but which are intended more for advanced learners/linguists and specialists looking for those minor (but never trivial) details on a language. This book is very well written and I am happy that such a publication exists because there isn't much available on the lesser known Uralic languages. My intention was to gain a better perspective on Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, and I was well pleased. Anyone looking into a more TECHNICAL side of these languages will be pleased. As an added note, do also look into Cambridge's material.

Solid book but some chapters use idiosyncratic notation
This remains as of 2009 to be the most up-to-date yet affordable (in paperback form) survey on the Uralic languages.

Each chapter is written by a specialist in that language or linguistic sub-family and adheres broadly to the same layout. It is meant most for students of comparative linguistics or very keen students of any Uralic language who would like to get detailed synchronic descriptions of phonology, morphology and syntax of the Uralic language that they're learning.

One complaint with the book is that it is somewhat dated by using some reconstructions from Redei's etymological dictionary of Uralic languages rather than what is in Sammallahti's book on historical phonology of Uralic languages, which reflects more up-to-date scholarship relating to reconstructions in Uralic proto-languages (e.g. Proto-Finno-Ugric, Proto-Finno-Permic ("Permian"))

Another complaint is that the chapters written by the editor, Daniel Abondolo use an idiosyncratic notation to analyze words, which I find is more of a hindrance than a help. Despite being explained at the outset, the notation diverges noticeably from traditional means or differs noticeably from the spelling conventions of the languages in question. In this case, the chapters for Finnish and Hungarian are littered with Abondolo's notation beside every traditional or standard representation of Finnish and Hungarian words. As someone with an intermediate-level command of Hungarian, I did not find his convention in the Hungarian chapter to be helpful at all and learned to ignore it, settling for the conventional spelling as I had learned from my Hungarian lessons. For people who have used Abondolo's course "Colloquial Finnish", they will probably be familiar with his taking such liberties (for those who don't know, Abondolo's "Colloquial Finnish" course presents grammar in an idiosyncratic way and teaches much non-standard language from the beginning rather than introducing it at a later stage after students have gained more familiarity with the standard language).

All in all "The Uralic Languages" is still a well-regarded reference work and apart from Abondolo's chapters, the chapters that were written by other specialists were quite interesting and much easier on me as I did not have to spend much time filtering out unconventional means of analyzing sentences. "The Uralic Languages" also has the advantage of being written in English. The nearest "competitor" available would be Denis Sinor's compilation of surveys and essays on the Uralic languages from 1988, titled "The Uralic Languages: Description, History and Foreign Influences". However it can be quite expensive (usually ~ $150 - $400 US as a reprint or even second-hand) and it contains contributions written in French and German in addition to English. Its utility would be less-than-optimal without having a good reading knowledge in those three languages.