SUMMARY
In this article I shall review the field of studies: “Uralic vs Indo-European contacts”. I shall report the thesis of what can be called the “old” and the “new” school, respectively, dealing with this topic. According to the old school, the contacts took place, essentially, among the historical languages, whereby the criteria for identifying loanwords are often unclear. According to the new school, instead, the (intensive) Uralic vs Indo-European contacts took place, essentially, at the level of protolanguages, and the loanwords are easily identifiable, thanks to the regularity of the relevant sound changes and substitutions. I shall claim that the thesis of new school is unlikely to be correct, on methodological and factual grounds: borrowing among proto-languages is impossible a priori; sound changes and substitutions are not always regular and systematic; the “binary” analysis “borrowing vs inherited” is out-of-date; the Uralic and Indo-European languages belong to different, distant “areal contexts”.