The Uralic languages (/ j ʊəˈr æ l ɪ k /; sometimes called Uralian languages / j ʊəˈr eɪ l i ə n /) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia.

In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or in some cases only partially attested. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method. In the family tree …

Proto-Uralic is the reconstructed language ancestral to the Uralic language family. The language was originally spoken in a small area in about 7000–2000 BCE (estimates vary), and expanded to give differentiated protolanguages. New research has pushed the Proto-Uralic homeland east of the Ural Mountains and deep into Siberia.

The proto-Uralic languages and the early Uralic people originated somewhere in eastern Siberia or possibly Northeast Asia. They were closely related to other Siberian and East Asian but also Inuit people. They migrated into central Siberia and then about 3,000 years ago started to migrate to the Baltic region in northeastern Europe. They assimilated many Paleo-European tribes.

Uralic is a large and diverse family of languages spoken in northern and eastern Europe and northwestern Siberia. Among the better-known Uralic languages are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian . Yukaghir is a small family of languages spoken in eastern Siberia. It formerly extended over a much wider area (Collinder 1965:30).

Although the current Sami languages are spoken much further to the north and west, Proto-Sami was likely spoken in the area of modern-day Southwestern Finland around the first few centuries CE. Local (in Sápmi) ancestors of the modern Sami people likely still spoke non-Uralic, "Paleoeuropean" languages at this point (see Pre-Finno-Ugric ...