Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language family's origins

[erronis]

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-ancient-dna-mystery-hungarian-finnish.html

Where did Europe's distinct Uralic family of languages—which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.

The analysis, led by a pair of doctoral candidates working with ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.

The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.

"Geographically, it's closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland," said co-lead author Alexander Mee-Woong Kim '13, M.A. '22.

Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence.

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[NNadir]

1. This reminds me of a joke my German Professor told.

Finnish apparently has sixteen (if I recall correctly) cases making German (with four) look easy.

The joke was "The Finnish Parliment spends 11 months of the year debating grammar and then for one month, everyone agrees to speak Swedish and get all their work done."

I wonder if this result will lead to renaming the language class something other than Uralic.

Hungarian is in this language class, and I have always wondered whether there is some quality in that language which accounts for all of the great Hungarian scientists who emigrated to the US in the 20th century., almost all of them incredible, the so called "Martians." I do believe that one's native language has a profound effect on how one thinks.

I used to think Basque was a related language, but apparently not. Basque is completely unique.

[3catwoman3]

2. I was pretty good at German during y jr and sr years of high school...

...and 2 semester in college, except for the danged "der-die-das" mysteries. No logic to it at all.

[Grins]

3. I was talking languages with our German au-pair

Me, describing how I avoided German in high school because it was complicated. She said not even native Germans understand German! The definitive rules were numerous, conflicting and varied around the nation.

And she spoke German, and English. Back in Germany and in college she spent a year attending a university in Norway, then a semester in Sweden, for fun learned French then Italian, and thought about Greek. Then married a Swede and now lives in Stockholm.

[NNadir]

5. Three "genders," four cases, 12 ways of saying "the." Mark...

....Twain wrote a funny piece (in German) where he remarked that German is the only language where the pronoun for a potato is "she," and for a little girl is "it."

[spooky3]

7. I wonder if this helps explain why many believe Finnish and

Hungarian are the two most difficult European languages?

[NNadir]

8. My son visited Hungary for a few days and came back giving me lectures on pronunciation...

...of Hungarian words.

He has this facility with languages and can passibly speak and read a number of them, how many I'm not exactly sure.

I told him if he started learning Hungarian I would be very annoyed since he's already a show off. (In fairness to the little 25 year old little brat, his old man brags about him quite a bit.)

Kids can learn a lot of languages on line these days if interested. I think my son became interested in languages because I complained during his childhood about how it is a tremendous weakness for Americans that we only speak one language, one for which many other countries have a large number of speakers.

When I worked for the Norwegians they were annoyed when I expressed interest in learning their language. There weren't at that time, over twenty years ago, a lot of resources for learning Norwegian so it didn't go anywhere.

Norway isn't linguistcally homogenous. There are still, I believe, a large subpopulation which speak the "uralic" Sami languages and dialects. When I was a boy, there was a girl in my class who spoke Finnish and if I recall correctly one of the Sami languages.

[spooky3]

9. Polyglots always amaze me. Nt

[Hassler]

6. My mom's Magyar peeps traveled a long way. Now why did

They pick Hungary? My guess, the thermal baths