However, quite a few prominent linguists have always taken the contrary view (e.g. Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Eugene Helimski, Frederik Kortlandt and Alwin Kloekhorst).

The Indo-Uralic hypothesis has been questioned by recent linguistic data, contradicting previous argued cognates, finding no support for a genealogical relationship between Uralic and Indo-European.

[4] The Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt supports a model of Indo-Uralic in which the original Indo-Uralic speakers lived north of the Caspian Sea, and the Proto-Indo-European speakers began as a group that branched off westward from there to come into geographic proximity with the Northwest Caucasian languages, absorbing a Northwest Caucasian lexical blending before moving farther westward to a region north of the Black Sea where their language settled into canonical Proto-Indo-European (2002:1).

Alternatively, the common protolanguage may have been located north of the Black Sea, with Proto-Uralic moving northwards with the climatic improvement of post-glacial times.

An authoritative if brief and sketchy history of early Indo-Uralic studies can be found in Holger Pedersen's Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (1931:336-338).

Sweet's treatment awakened "[g]reat interest" in the question, but "his space was too limited to permit of actual proof" (Pedersen 1931:337).

Sweet considered the relationship to be securely established, stating (1900:120; "Aryan" = Indo-European, "Ugrian" = Finno-Ugric): If all these and many other resemblances that might be adduced do not prove the common origin of Aryan and Ugrian, and if we assume that the Ugrians borrowed not only a great part of their vocabulary, but also many of their derivative syllables, together with at least the personal endings of their verbs from Aryan, then the whole fabric of comparative philology falls to the ground, and we are no longer justified in inferring from the similarity of the inflections in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit that these languages have a common origin.The short name "Indo-Uralic" (German Indo-Uralisch) for the hypothesis was first introduced by Hannes Sköld 1927.

The most extensive attempt to establish sound correspondences between Indo-European and Uralic to date is that of the Slovenian linguist Bojan Čop.

It is clear from the statements of supporters such as Sweet that they were facing considerable opposition and that the general climate of opinion was against them, except perhaps in Scandinavia.

Perhaps the best-known critique of recent times is that of Jorma Koivulehto,[citation needed] issued in a series of carefully formulated articles.

Koivulehto's central contention, agreeing with Rédei's views, is that all of the lexical items claimed to be Indo-Uralic can be explained as loans from Indo-European into Uralic (see below for examples).

[7] According to Angela Marcantonio (2014) and Johan Schalin a genetic relation between Uralic and Indo-European is very unlikely and most similarities are explained through borrowings and chance resemblances.

[8] In 2022, a group of scholars concluded that Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European do not share a genealogical relationship with each other, as "whether based on cognacy or loans the argument from lexical resemblances is flawed".

A number of typological properties are eastern-looking overall, fitting comfortably into northeast Asia, Siberia, or the North Pacific Rim".

The Proto-Indo-European form of this word was *ḱm̥tóm (compare Latin centum), which became *ćatám in early Indo-Iranian (reanalyzed as the neuter nominative–accusative singular of an a stem > Sanskrit śatá-, Avestan sata-).

It provides linguistic evidence for the geographical location of these languages around that time, agreeing with archeological evidence that Indo-European speakers were present in the Pontic-Caspian steppes by around 4500 BCE (the Kurgan hypothesis) and that Uralic speakers may have been established in the Pit-Comb Ware culture to their north in the fifth millennium BCE (Carpelan & Parpola 2001:79).

Finnish has been very conservative in retaining the basic structure of the borrowed word, nearly preserving the nominative singular case marker reconstructed for Proto-Germanic masculine 'a'-stems.

Proto-Uralic *nimi- has been explained according to sound laws governing substitutions in borrowings (Koivulehto 1999), on the assumption that the original was a zero-grade oblique stem PIE *(H)nmen- as attested in later Balto-Slavic *inmen- and Proto-Celtic *anmen-.

Proto-Uralic *weti- could be a loan from the PIE oblique e-grade form for 'water' or from an indirectly attested cognate root noun *wed-.

This would appear to show that if Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic are to be related, the connection must lie so far back that the families developed their number systems independently and did not inherit them from their purported common ancestor.

2 This word belongs to the r and n stems, a small group of neuter nouns, from an archaic stratum of Indo-European, that alternate -er (or -or) in the nominative and accusative with -en in the other cases.