Finno-Ugric Group of Languages

Finland, Hungary, Estonia and a few other European countries speak a language unrelated to those of their neighbors. Most Europeans speak an Indo-European language, many the descendants of Latin (the Romance languages), but not these. Their language comes from the Finno-Ugric group, which is believed to have started in the region of the Volga River and Ural Mountains.
The two main divisions of the Finno-Ugric group of languages are, not surprisingly, Finnish and Ugric. The Finnish speakers live between Norway and the White Sea, Finland, Estonia, and parts of Russia. The Ugric languages are Hungarian, Khanty (or Ostyak), and Mansi (or Vogul), to the east of the Urals.
There are other Finno-Ugric languages spoken within Russia.
Some believe the Finno-Ugric languages share a common ancestry with Turkish and Japanese. The (hypothetical) umbrella language group is called Ural-Altaic. Three branches of the Altaic group are Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus. The Ural group is formed of two language groups: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed.