Ugricspeaking

Ugricspeaking refers to peoples and communities whose languages belong to the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. The Ugric branch includes Hungarian, Khanty, and Mansi. In some classifications, Khanty and Mansi are grouped as Ob-Ugric languages, with Hungarian occupying the other main Ugric position. The languages share a common ancestry and are distinguished from other Uralic languages by certain sound and morphological features.

Hungarian is by far the most widely spoken Ugric language, with about 13 million native speakers, concentrated in Hungary and in neighboring regions, as well as diaspora communities. Khanty and Mansi are minority languages spoken in western Siberia, Russia, with tens of thousands of speakers combined; both are considered endangered due to small populations and language shift toward Russian. There are regional efforts to support language transmission in schools and cultural programs, though vitality varies by community.

Ugric languages are generally agglutinative, with extensive suffixation and rich case systems. Hungarian is known for vowel harmony and flexible word order. Khanty and Mansi share typological features common to Uralic languages, including agglutination and complex aspectual systems. Orthography differs by language: Hungarian uses a Latin-based alphabet with diacritics; Khanty and Mansi in Russia have Cyrillic-based scripts in official use, with Latin scripts used in some educational and academic contexts.

Historically, the Ugric languages form a branch of the Uralic family alongside other Finno-Ugric languages. The term 'Ugricspeaking' is used in ethnolinguistic contexts to describe communities whose linguistic identity is defined by Ugric heritage, and it highlights linguistic diversity within Eurasia.