The examination of evidentiality in the Uralic languages has become a popular research area in the last few decades. Since Aikhenvald's monograph (2004), new aspects have been emerging permanently in this research area, the examination of these new aspects, however, has been omitted from the study of Uralic languages. Comprehensive and reviewing studies have been published in Uralic linguistics as well (e.g. Skribnik - Kehayov 2018, Tamm et al. 2018) but these - despite all their merits - are sketchy, chapter-long reviews. The basic goal of our project is to summarize the results so far concerning each language and to present new results in languages with grammatical evidentiality. The theoretical framework is determined by the available sources. We consider the functional, typological descriptions to be the most important, but our analysis is complex and has the following research objectives: the description of evidentiality from a typological aspect in the light of the newer parameters (Brugman - Macaulay 2015, Aikhenvald ed. 2018); the description of the historical background, and the cultural explanation of evidentiality; involving pragmatic aspects (the examination of narrative genres, dialogues, online sources etc.): analysis of differences between various types of discourses concerning evidentiality as well as taking into account sociolinguistic aspects. All this is encompassed by the complex parameter system set up by the earlier and the newer literature on this topic, in the framework of which the most neglected areas can be examined as well, such as viewpoint, person’s role, text types, sentence types, optionality, engagement and epistemic modality.

The main question of the research is to what extent more recent theories and results concerning evidentiality can be compatible with our knowledge on evidentiality in the Uralic languages, as well as what new aspects this new knowledge could add to the description of evidentiality in the Uralic languages.
A further question is, considering the various ways of expressing evidentiality in the Uralic languages (i.e. the evidential meaning is expressed in different ways in almost all language branches), whether it is possible to outline a process accounting for the development of evidentiality from Proto-Uralic. A unified evidential system cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Uralic, the features found in certain Uralic languages and the similarities between them are the results of areal effects and independent innovations within the given languages. The characterization of this historical process - a description of the historical background of the evidential markers and their functions - is an important aim of our project and it is an integral part of the synchronic analysis of evidentiality in the Uralic languages.
Our further aim is to enrich the typological literature on evidentiality with data and reliable descriptions of the Uralic languages, since they have been quite underrepresented in the typological literature so far, for instance, the two chapters of WALS dealing with evidentiality include only three Uralic languages.

Evidentiality indicates the speaker’s information source, for example that they heard it from another person, they inferred it from certain circumstances or they have non-visual experience (e.g. hearing, smelling, touching). There is a great cross-linguistic variation regarding evidentiality, but research focuses primarily on such languages in which evidentiality is a grammatical category, and its use is more or less obligatory. Evidentiality shows a varied picture in the Uralic languages as well, considering both the quantity and the quality of evidence types and the means for expressing them.
The significance of our research lies in the fact that it aims to integrate evidentiality, as a semantically complex grammatical category manifested diversely in the given languages, into the basic topics of Uralic linguistics with an adequate comparative method both from a historical and a typological point of view. This would also strengthen that line of research claiming that behind language changes and especially behind changes of grammatical structures external causes can be detected as well. Besides, aspects connected to language use (sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects) are also involved in our analysis. The aim of our project is to analyze this diversity in a unified framework based on typological results, but involving numerous other aspects too. This method would enable us to create a comparative system involving such a part of grammar that is related to several other grammatical areas, and also shaped by extra-linguistic factors.

Evidentiality as a grammatical category has become a popular research area in the last few decades. Evidentiality indicates the speaker’s information source, for example that they heard it from another person, they inferred it from certain circumstances or they have non-visual experience (e.g. hearing, smelling, touching). There is a great cross-linguistic variation regarding evidentiality, but research focuses primarily on such languages in which evidentiality is a grammatical category, and its use is more or less obligatory. Evidentiality shows a varied picture in the Uralic languages as well, considering both the quantity and the quality of evidence types and the means for expressing them.
The aim of our project is to analyze this diversity in a unified framework based on typological results, but involving numerous other aspects as well. This method would enable us to create a comparative system involving such a part of grammar that is related to several other grammatical areas, and also shaped by extra-linguistic factors.
Our further aim is to enrich and form our way of thinking about language introducing a fairly new, but in all languages existing category by the description of related languages of Hungarian.