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).

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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.

This chapter gives an overview of Uralic evidential systems: of the type A3 in Finnic, A2 in Mari and Permic, A1 and A2 in Ob-Ugric (with strong mirativization), of B3, C3, and higher types in Samoyedic, i.e. very different in different branches of the Uralic family. Due to this and to similarities in both semantic values and coding with their geographical neighbours, grammatical evidentiality cannot be considered an inherited feature of Uralic languages—but rather appeared due to areal diffusion and independent innovations with different sources, from past tenses to desubordination. Uralic evidentials are not used in commands and tend to be incompatible with non-indicative moods; they are rarely found in negative clauses and questions, in which case they are outside the scope of the negative/interrogative operator; i.e. the content of the clause is negated/questioned, not the information source.

Ugric is an umbrella term for Hungarian and the two Ob-Ugric languages or language groups spoken in West Siberia, namely Khanty (in older literature, also known as “Ostyak”) and Mansi ("Vogul"). Traditionally, they have been considered to form a distinct subtaxon in the Uralic language family. However, although some common Ugric features can be found at all levels of language structure, many scholars now claim that these do not necessarily derive from a common Ugric protolanguage but rather reflect Sprachbund-like contact influences between Proto-Hungarian, Proto-Khanty, and Proto-Mansi. Departing from this prehistoric setting, this chapter presents an overview of the structure of the Ugric languages and the possible Common Ugric features in their phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax, also briefly describing the language contacts which have contributed to the formation of today’s Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi varieties.