The widespread Uralic family offers several advantages for tracing prehistory: a firm absolute chronological anchor point in an ancient contact episode with well-dated Indo-Iranian; other points of intersection or diagnostic non-intersection with early Indo-European (the Late Proto-Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya culture of the western steppe, the Afanasievo culture of the upper Yenisei, and the Fatyanovo culture of the middle Volga); lexical and morphological reconstruction sufficient to establish critical absences of sharings and contacts. We add information on climate, linguistic geography, typology, and cognate frequency distributions to reconstruct the Uralic origin and spread. We argue that the Uralic homeland was east of the Urals and initially out of contact with Indo-European. The spread was rapid and without widespread shared substratal effects. We reconstruct its cause as the interconnected reactions of early Uralic and Indo-European populations to a catastrophic climate change episode and interregionalization opportunities which advantaged riverine hunter-fishers over herders.

The purpose of this article is to outline morphological facts about the two literary languages Erzya and Moksha, which can be used for estimating the distinctive character of these individual language forms. Whereas earlier morphological evaluations of the linguistic distance between Erzya and Moksha have placed them in the area of 90% cohesion, this one does not. This study evaluates the languages on the basis of non-ambiguity, parallel sets of ambiguity and divergent ambiguity. Non-ambiguity is found in combinatory function to morphological formant alignment, e.g. молян go+V+Ind+Prs+ScSg1. Parallel sets of ambiguity is found in combinatory-function set to morphological formant alignment where both languages share the same sets of ambiguous readings, e.g. саизь v s сявозь take+V+Ind+ScPl3+OcSg3, ScPl3+OcPl3. Divergent ambiguity is found in forms with non- symmetric alignments of combinatory functions, e.g. саинек take+V+Ind+Prt1+ScPl1, +Prt1+ScPl1+OcSg3, +Prt1+ScPl1+OcPl3 vs сявоме take+V+Ind+Prt1+ScPl1, сявоськ take+V+Ind+Prt1+ScPl1+OcSg3, +Prt1+ScPl1+OcPl3. This morphological evaluation will establish the preparatory work in syntactic disambiguation necessary for facilitating Erzya↔Moksha machine translation, whereas machine translation will enhance the usage of mutual language resources. Results show that the Erzya and Moksha languages, in the absence of loan words from the 20 th century, share less than 50% of their vocabularies, 63% of their regular nominal declensions and 48% of their regular finite conjugations.

This paper presents the current lexical, morphological, syntactic and rule-based machine translation work for Erzya and Moksha that can and should be used in the development of a roadmap for Mordvin linguistic research. We seek to illustrate and outline initial problem types to be encountered in the construction of an Apertium-based shallow-transfer machine translation system for the Mordvin language forms. We indicate reference points within Mordvin Studies and other parts of Uralic studies, as a point of departure for outlining a linguistic studies with a means for measuring its own progress and developing a roadmap for further studies. Keywords: Erzya, Moksha, Uralic, Shallow-transfer machine translation, Measurable language research, Measurable language distance, Finite-State Morphology, Universal Dependencies

This paper will provide a brief description of Skolt Sami and how it might be construed as a pluricentric language. Historical factors are identified that might contribute to a pluricentric identity: geographic location and political history; shortages of language documentation, and the establishment of a normative body for the development of a standard language. Skolt Sami is assessed in the context of Sami languages and is forwarded as one of a closely related yet distinct language group. Here the issue then becomes one of facilitating diversity even for under-documented languages. And we aptly describe opportunities in language technology that have been utilized to this end. Finally, brief insight is given for other Uralic languages with regard to pluricentric character and possibilities for language users to facilitate the maintenance of their individual language needs.