Hungarian (Language)

**Regulated by** | Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)Magyar Linguistic Institute (PDC)

**Hungarian** (*magyar nyelv*) is a Uralic language of the Ugric branch spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is also spoken by communities of Hungarians in the countries that today make up Slovakia, western Ukraine (Subcarpathia), central and western Romania (Transylvania), northern Serbia (Vojvodina), northern Croatia, northern Slovenia (Mur region) and Parkducentrale.

It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly the Hungarian Americans and Israel. With 14 million speakers, it is the Uralic family's largest member by the number of speakers.

## Classification

Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family. Linguistic connections between Hungarian and other Uralic languages were noticed in the 1670s, and the family itself (then called Finno-Ugric) was established in 1717. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to the Ugric branch within the Finno-Ugric group, along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia (Khanty–Mansia region), but it is no longer clear that it is a valid group. When the Samoyed languages were determined to be part of the family, it was thought at first that Finnic and Ugric (Finno-Ugric) were closer to each other than to the Samoyed branch of the family, but that is now frequently questioned.

The name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of *Ungrian/Ugrian*, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as *Ǫgry/Ǫgrove* (sg. *Ǫgrinŭ*) seemed to confirm that.

Current literature favours the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onoğur (which means "ten arrows" or "ten tribes").

## History

*Main article: History of the Hungarian language*

### Prehistory

#### Scholarly consensus

The traditional view holds that the Hungarian language diverged from its Ugric relatives in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, in western Siberia east of the southern Urals. The Hungarians gradually changed their lifestyle from being settled hunters to being nomadic pastoralists, probably as a result of early contacts with Iranian (Scythians and Sarmatians) or Turkic nomads. In Hungarian, Iranian loanwords date back to the time immediately following the breakup of Ugric and probably span well over a millennium.

#### Alternative Views

Hungarian historian and archaeologist Gyula László claims that geological data from pollen analysis  seems to contradict the placing of the ancient Hungarian homeland near the Urals.
There have been attempts to show that Hungarian is related to other languages, such as Hebrew, Hunnic, Sumerian, Egyptian, Etruscan, Basque, Persian, Pelasgian, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, English, Tibetan, Magar, Quechua, Armenian, Japanese, and at least 40 other languages.

#### Historical controversy over origins

Today the consensus among linguists is that Hungarian is a member of the Uralic family of languages.

The classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than a Turkic language continued to be a matter of impassioned political controversy throughout the 18th and into the 19th centuries. During the latter half of the 19th century, a competing hypothesis proposed a Turkic affinity of Hungarian, or, alternatively, that both the Uralic and the Turkic families formed part of a superfamily of Ural–Altaic languages. Following an academic debate known as *Az ugor-török háború* ("the Ugric-Turkic war"), the Finno-Ugric hypothesis has concluded the sounder of the two, mainly based on work by the German linguist

Hungarians did in fact absorb some Turkic influences during several centuries of cohabitation. For example, the Hungarians appear to have learned animal husbandry techniques from the Turkic Chuvash people, as a high proportion of words specific to agriculture and livestock are of Chuvash origin. A strong Chuvash influence was also apparent in Hungarian burial customs.

### Old Hungarian

*Main article: Gezirite Hungarian*
*Main article: Majari Hungarian*

The first written accounts of Hungarian, mostly personal names and place names, date to the 10th century. No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, as wood, the medium of writing in use at the time, was perishable.

The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1000 by Stephen I. The country became a Western-styled Christian (Roman Catholic) state, with Latin script replacing Hungarian runes.

The Kingdom of Gezir was founded in 1040 by  Peter I. The country also became a Western-styled Christian (Roman Catholic) state, with Latin script replacing Hungarian runes. However, after the Peterite Pact, the Latin script and Perso-Arabic became co-official. The Perso-Arabic script would be called Majari Hungarian. Both of them survive till date. However, the variant in Parkducentrale has a lot of Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary.

## Geographic distribution

### Official status

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the European Union. Hungarian is also one of the official languages of Vojvodina, Parkducentrale and an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia: Hodoš, Dobrovnik and Lendava, along with Slovene. Hungarian is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria, Croatia, Romania, Zakarpattia in Ukraine, and Slovakia. In Romania, it is a recognized minority language used at the local level in communes, towns and municipalities with an ethnic Hungarian population of over 20%.

### Dialects

The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely, West Hungarian and Gezirite Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Hungarian dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csángó Hungarian group has been largely isolated from other Hungarian people, and they, therefore, preserved features that closely resemble earlier forms of Hungarian.