The Uralic languages  /jʊərˈrælɨk/ (sometimes referred to as Uralian /jʊˈreɪliən/ languages) constitute a language family of some three dozenlanguages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. Countries that are home to a significant number of speakers of Uralic languages include Austria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Ukraine.

The name "Uralic" refers to the suggested Urheimat (original homeland) of the Uralic family, which is often located in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, as the modern languages are spoken on both sides of this mountain range.

Finno-Ugric is now sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though historically Finno-Ugric had been understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages.

In recent times, linguists often place the Urheimat, (German: original homeland), of the Proto-Uralic language in the vicinity of the Volga River, west of the Urals, close to the Urheimat of the Indo-European languages, or to the east and southeast of the Urals. Gy. Laszlo places its origin in the forest zone between the Oka River and central Poland. E.N. Setälä and M. Zsirai place it between the Volga and Kama Rivers. According to E. Itkonen, the ancestral area extended to the Baltic Sea. P. Hajdu has suggested a homeland in western and northwestern Siberia.

Mansi (obsolete: Voguls) are an endangered indigenous people living in Khanty–Mansia, an autonomous okrug within Tyumen Oblast in Russia. In Khanty–Mansia, the Khanty and Mansi languages have co-official status with Russian.

The Mansi have been in contact with the Russian state at least since the 16th century when most of western Siberia was brought under Russian control by Ermak. Due to their higher exposure to Russian and Soviet control, they are generally more assimilated than their northern neighbours, the Khanty.

In the 1960s, exploitation of the rich oil deposits of Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug began, causing the Soviet Union's largest internal migration wave since the Second World War. This led to a dramatic marginalisation of the Mansi and Khanty who today constitute slightly more than one percent of the district's population.

As for most other Northern indigenous peoples of Russia, the Soviet state ordered the creation of a "national literature" for the Mansi people which consisted mostly of works hailing the enlightenment and progress brought to the Mansi by Lenin's revolution. The most prominent Mansi representative of this genre was the writer Yuvan Shestalov, who after the breakup of the Soviet Union converted to shamanism. Since then he claims that the Mansi are in fact the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, an assertion shared by few.