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The Finnic (Fennic) or Baltic Finnic (Balto-Finnic, Balto-Fennic) languages are a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by about 7 million people. Traditionally eight Finnic languages have been recognized.〔 〕 The major modern representatives of the family are Finnish and Estonian, the official languages of their respective nation states.〔(Finnic Peoples ) at Encyclopædia Britannica〕 The other Finnic languages in the Baltic Sea region are Ingrian and Votic, spoken in Ingria by the Gulf of Finland; and Livonian, once spoken around Gulf of Riga. Spoken farther northeast are Karelian, Ludian and Veps, in the region of Lakes Onega and Ladoga. In addition, since the 1990s, several Finnic-speaking minority groups have emerged to seek of recognition as distinct languages, and have established separate literary standard languages.〔 Northern Karelian, Tver Karelian and Livvi represent the three main dialect groups of Karelian, which earlier had been an unwritten language. Võro and Seto (modern descendants of historical South Estonian) are spoken in southeastern Estonia, and have been earlier considered dialects of Estonian. Meänkieli and Kven are spoken in northern Sweden and Norway, and have the legal status of independent languages. They have been earlier considered dialects of Finnish, and remain mutually intelligible with Finnish. The smaller languages are endangered. The last native speaker of Livonian died in 2013, and only about a dozen native speakers of Votic remain. Regardless, even for these languages, the shaping of a standard language and education in it continues. The geographic centre of the maximum divergence between the languages is located south of the Gulf of Finland. ==Classification== (詳細はSamic languages has for long been assumed, though many of the similarities (particularly lexical ones) can be shown to result from common influence from the Germanic and, to a lesser extent, the Baltic languages. Innovations are also found between Finnic and the Mordvinic languages, and in recent times these three groups are frequently considered together. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Finnic languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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