The Finno-Ugric peoples are any of several peoples of Europe who speak languages of the Finno-Ugric language family, such as the Finns, Estonians, Mordvins, and Hungarians. Their languages are part of the Uralic language family and are not related to Indo-European languages such as Germanic, Slavic, and Romance.

A study of Population Genetics of Finno-Ugric speaking humans in North Eurasia carried out between 2002–2008 in the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Helsinki showed most of the Finno-Ugric speaking populations possess amalgamation of West and East Eurasian gene pools supporting the idea of mixed origins in these populations. North Eurasian Finno-Ugric-speaking populations were found to be genetically a heterogeneous group showing lower haplotype diversities compared to more southern populations.

In Finnic- and Ugric-speaking countries such as Finland, Estonia and Hungary, which find themselves surrounded by unrelated tongues, language origins and language history have long been relevant to national identity. At the same time, nationalist ideologies in Hungary have been hostile to historical linguistics for demonstrating the close relationship between Hungarians and the Ugric peoples of central Russia, the Khanty and Mansi subsistence hunters and fishermen. Hungarian nationalists envision Hungarian kinship with more "prestigious" peoples such as the Sumerians, and the discovery of the Finno-Ugric linguistic links was a "psychological blow", as Hungarians had long prided themselves in their supposed Scythian origins, and indeed many Hungarians refuse to accept linguistic findings even today. Thus Finno-Ugric is not an ethnic group based on common culture or identity, but rather a discovery of linguistics:

Finno-Ugric ( /ˌfɪnoʊˈjuːɡrɪk/ or /ˌfɪnoʊˈuːɡrɪk/),Finno-Ugrian or Fenno-Ugric is a traditional group of languages in the Uralic language family that comprises the Finno-Permic and Ugric language families. The three most spoken members are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.

Linguistic roots common to both branches of the traditional Finno-Ugric language tree (Finno-Permic and Ugric) are extremely distant. About two hundred words with common roots in all main Finno-Ugric languages have been identified by philologists including fifty-five about fishing, fifteen about reindeer, and three about commerce.

The term Finno-Ugric languages, which originally represented the entire language-family proposal^{[citation needed]}, is sometimes used as a synonym for the more recent term Uralic, including the Samoyedic branch, as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries.

The validity of Finno-Ugric as a genetic grouping is under challenge, with some feeling that the Finno-Permic languages are as distinct from the Ugric languages as they are from the Samoyedic languages spoken in Siberia, or even that none of the Finno-Ugric, Finno-Permic, or Ugric branches have been established. Received opinion has been that the eastmost (and last discovered) Samoyed had separated first and the branching into Ugric and Finno-Permic took place later, but this reconstruction does not have strong support in the linguistic data. In the past, and occasionally today as well, the term Finno-Ugric was used for the entire Uralic language family.

The Sami people, also spelled Sámi or Saami, are the indigenous people inhabiting the Arctic area of Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of far northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between south and middle Sweden and Norway. The Sámi are the only indigenous people of Scandinavia recognized under the international conventions of Indigenous peoples, and hence the northernmost indigenous people of Europe.Sami ancestral lands span an area of approximately 388,350 km² (150,000 sq. mi.), which is approximately the size of Sweden, in the Nordic countries. Their traditional languages are the Sami languages and are classified as a branch of the Uralic language family. The Sami languages are endangered.

Traditionally, the Sami have pursued a variety of livelihoods, including coastal fishing, fur trapping and sheep herding. Their best-known means of livelihood is semi-nomadic reindeer herding, with which about 10% of the Sami are connected and 2,800 actively involved on a full-time basis. For traditional, environmental, cultural and political reasons, reindeer herding is legally reserved only for Sami people in certain regions of the Nordic countries.