Uralic is a large and diverse family of languages spoken in northern and eastern Europe and northwestern Siberia.

Proponents of the Uralo-Siberian proposal include Uralo-Yukaghir as one of its two branches, alongside the Siberian languages (sometimes Nivkh, (formerly) Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut).

[2][3] Holger Pedersen (1931) included Uralic and Yukaghir in his proposed Nostratic language family, and also noted some similarities between them.

[20] Häkkinen (2012) argues that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes that putative Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are in fact borrowings from an early stage of Uralic (c. 3000 BC; he dates Proto-Uralic to c. 2000 BC) into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was (according to him) spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal.

[22] Proponents of the theory have attempted to respond to criticisms with arguments that Uralic correspondences are found very extensively in function words and in the most used vocabulary which is allegedly very rarely borrowed.