This chapter provides a concise overview of the standardization of Uralic languages, focusing on the Uralic minority languages and their orthographies. While the first attempts at creating a written form for the Saami languages were prompted by the Reformation in Scandinavia, most Uralic written standards have only come into being in the twentieth century, and in Russia, these processes were typically part of the ambitious ethnopolitics of the early Soviet period. The Saami and Finnic orthographies are mostly Latin-based. In the Soviet Union, alongside Cyrillic or Cyrillic-based alphabets such as the Molodcov alphabet for Komi, Latin-based experimental alphabets were introduced for some Uralic languages in the 1930s; today, most Uralic languages of Russia employ the Cyrillic alphabet, and for representing phonological phenomena unknown to Russian, various orthographic solutions have been developed. The chapter also briefly describes the most important linguistic transcriptions, in particular, the Finno-Ugric Transcription (FUT).
This chapter provides an introduction to Part III, explaining the motivation of this collection of typological case studies from issues of phonology to syntax and information structuring. Overviews of this kind are an innovation; they have usually not been included in previous handbooks of Uralic languages. While the comparative-historical approach has always played a central role in Uralic studies, synchronic typological, areal, and contrastive studies with a cross-Uralic scope have begun to appear in the last decades of the twentieth century, together with the rise of linguistic typology and recent developments in the documentation of endangered and minority languages. Typological research in recent decades has discovered or (re)defined features, structures, and categories that exist also in Uralic languages, but were not properly recognized and described; alternatively, they were described in different, often idiosyncratic terms.
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