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Hungarian
magyar nyelv
Pronunciation	[ˈmɒɟɒr ˈɲɛlv] ⓘ
Native to	Hungary and areas of east Austria, Croatia, Romania, northern Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, western Ukraine
Ethnicity	Hungarians
Native speakers	17 million (2003–2014)[1]
Language family	Uralic Finno-Ugric? Ugric? Hungarian
Writing system	Latin (Hungarian alphabet) Hungarian Braille Old Hungarian script
Official status
Official language in	Hungary European Union Serbia (in Vojvodina) Austria (in Burgenland) Slovenia (in Prekmurje)
Recognised minority language in	Romania (in Transylvania) Croatia[2] Slovakia Czech Republic Ukraine (in Berehove, Mukachevo, Vynohradiv and Uzhhorod districts of Transcarpathian region (Zakarpattia Oblast))[citation needed]
Regulated by	Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
Language codes
ISO 639-1	hu
ISO 639-2	hun
ISO 639-3	Either: hun – Modern Hungarian ohu – Old Hungarian
Linguist List	ohu Old Hungarian
Glottolog	hung1274
Linguasphere	41-BAA-a
Map of regions where those whose native language is Hungarian represent a majority (dark blue) or a substantial minority (light blue). Based on recent censuses and on the CIA World Factbook 2014[3]
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Hungarian language
Hungarian alphabet
Alphabet
ő ű cs dz dzs gy ly ny sz ty zs
Grammar
Noun phrases Verbs T–V distinction
History
Sound correspondences with other Uralic languages
Other features
Phonetics and phonology Vowel harmony Orthography Old Hungarian script Hungarian Braille Hungarian names
Hungarian and English
Hungarian pronunciation of English English words from Hungarian
Regulatory body
v t e

Hungarian (magyar nyelv, pronounced [ˈmɒɟɒr ˈɲɛlv] ^ⓘ) is a Uralic language 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 Hungarian communities in southern Slovakia, western Ukraine (Transcarpathia), central and western Romania (Transylvania), northern Serbia (Vojvodina), northern Croatia, northeastern Slovenia (Prekmurje), and eastern Austria (Burgenland).

It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly the United States and Canada) and Israel. With 14 million speakers, it is the Uralic family's largest member by number of speakers.^[4]

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 was established in 1717. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to the Ugric branch along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia (Khanty–Mansia region of North Asia), but it is no longer clear that it is a valid group.^{[5][6][7][8][9]} When the Samoyed languages were determined to be part of the family, it was thought at first that Finnic and Ugric (the most divergent branches within Finno-Ugric) were closer to each other than to the Samoyed branch of the family, but that is now frequently questioned.^[10][8][7]

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.^[11] Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onoğur (which means "ten arrows" or "ten tribes").^[12][13][14]

There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /aː/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, and Hungarian /h/ corresponds to Khanty /x/, while Hungarian final /z/ corresponds to Khanty final /t/. For example, Hungarian ház [haːz] "house" vs. Khanty xot "house", and Hungarian száz "hundred" vs. Khanty sot "hundred". The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular.

History

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.^[15] In Hungarian, Iranian loanwords date back to the time immediately following the breakup of Ugric and probably span well over a millennium.^[16] These include tehén 'cow' (cf. Avestan daénu); tíz 'ten' (cf. Avestan dasa); tej 'milk' (cf. Persian dáje 'wet nurse'); and nád 'reed' (from late Middle Iranian; cf. Middle Persian nāy and Modern Persian ney).

Archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.^[17] The Onoğurs (and Bulgars) later had a great influence on the language, especially between the 5th and 9th centuries. This layer of Turkic loans is large and varied (e.g. szó "word", from Turkic; and daru "crane", from the related Permic languages), and includes words borrowed from Oghur Turkic; e.g. borjú "calf" (cf. Chuvash păru, părăv vs. Turkish buzağı);^[18] dél 'noon; south' (cf. Chuvash tĕl vs. Turkish dial. düš).^[19] Many words related to agriculture,^[20] state administration and even family relationships show evidence of such backgrounds.^{[citation needed]} Hungarian syntax and grammar were not influenced in a similarly dramatic way over these three centuries.^{[citation needed]}

After the arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, the language came into contact with a variety of speech communities, among them Slavic, Turkic, and German. Turkic loans from this period come mainly from the Pechenegs and Cumanians, who settled in Hungary during the 12th and 13th centuries: e.g. koboz "cobza" (cf. Turkish kopuz 'lute'); komondor "mop dog" (< *kumandur < Cuman). Hungarian borrowed 20% of words from neighbouring Slavic languages: e.g. tégla 'brick'; mák 'poppy seed'; szerda 'Wednesday'; csütörtök 'Thursday'...; karácsony 'Christmas'.^[21][22] These languages in turn borrowed words from Hungarian: e.g. Serbo-Croatian ašov from Hungarian ásó 'spade'. About 1.6 percent of the Romanian lexicon is of Hungarian origin.^[23][24]

In the 21st century, studies support an origin of the Uralic languages, including early Hungarian, in eastern or central Siberia, somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei rivers or near the Sayan mountains in the Russian–Mongolian border region.^[25] A 2019 study based on genetics, archaeology and linguistics, found that early Uralic speakers arrived in Europe from the east, specifically from eastern Siberia.^[26]

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.^[27]

Historical controversy over origins

Today, the consensus among linguists is that Hungarian is a member of the Uralic family of languages.^[28]

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 was concluded the sounder of the two, mainly based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz.^[29]

Hungarians did, in fact, absorb some Turkic influences during several centuries of cohabitation. The influence on Hungarians was mainly from the Turkic Oghur speakers such as Sabirs, Bulgars of Atil, Kabars and Khazars. The Oghur tribes are often connected with the Hungarians whose exoethnonym is usually derived from Onogurs (> (H)ungars), a Turkic tribal confederation.^[30] The similarity between customs of Hungarians and the Chuvash people, the only surviving member of the Oghur tribes, is visible. For example, the Hungarians appear to have learned animal husbandry techniques from the Oghur speaking Chuvash people (or historically Suvar people^[31]), 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

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The first written accounts of Hungarian date to the 10th century, such as mostly Hungarian personal names and place names in De Administrando Imperio, written in Greek by Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VII.^[32] No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, because the medium of writing used at the time, wood, is 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 earliest remaining fragments of the language are found in the establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from 1055, intermingled with Latin text. The first extant text fully written in Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, which dates to the 1190s. Although the orthography of these early texts differed considerably from that used today, contemporary Hungarians can still understand a great deal of the reconstructed spoken language, despite changes in grammar and vocabulary.^{[citation needed]}

A more extensive body of Hungarian literature arose after 1300. The earliest known example of Hungarian religious poetry is the 14th-century Lamentations of Mary. The first Bible translation was the Hussite Bible in the 1430s.^[33][34]

The standard language lost its diphthongs, and several postpositions transformed into suffixes, including reá "onto" (the phrase utu rea "onto the way" found in the 1055 text would later become útra). There were also changes in the system of vowel harmony. At one time, Hungarian used six verb tenses, while today only two or three are used.^{[35][note 1]}

Modern Hungarian

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In 1533, Kraków printer Benedek Komjáti published Letters of St. Paul in Hungarian ^[hu] (modern orthography: A Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven), the first Hungarian-language book set in movable type.

By the 17th century, the language already closely resembled its present-day form, although two of the past tenses remained in use. German, Italian and French loans also began to appear. Further Turkish words were borrowed during the period of Ottoman rule (1541 to 1699).

In the 19th century, a group of writers, most notably Ferenc Kazinczy, spearheaded a process of nyelvújítás (language revitalization). Some words were shortened (győzedelem > győzelem, 'victory' or 'triumph'); a number of dialectal words spread nationally (e.g., cselleng 'dawdle'); extinct words were reintroduced (dísz, 'décor'); a wide range of expressions were coined using the various derivative suffixes; and some other, less frequently used methods of expanding the language were utilized. This movement produced more than ten thousand words, most of which are used actively today.

The 19th and 20th centuries saw further standardization of the language, and differences between mutually comprehensible dialects gradually diminished.

In 1920, Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, losing 71 percent of its territory and one-third of the ethnic Hungarian population along with it.

Today, the language holds official status nationally in Hungary and regionally in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Austria and Slovenia.

In 2014 The proportion of Transylvanian students studying Hungarian exceeded the proportion of Hungarian students, which shows that the effects of Romanianization are slowly getting reversed and regaining popularity. ^[36] The Dictate of Trianon resulted in a high proportion of Hungarians in the surrounding 7 countries, so it is widely spoken or understood. Although host countries are not always considerate of Hungarian langue users,^[37][38][39] communities are strong. The Szeklers, for example, form their own region and have their own national museum, educational institutions, and hospitals.

Geographic distribution

Source: National censuses, Ethnologue

Hungarian has about 13 million^[48][49][50] native speakers, of whom more than 9.8 million live in Hungary. According to the 2011 Hungarian census, 9,896,333 people (99.6% of the total population) speak Hungarian, of whom 9,827,875 people (98.9%) speak it as a first language, while 68,458 people (0.7%) speak it as a second language.^[40] About 2.2 million speakers live in other areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon (1920). Of these, the largest group lives in Transylvania, the western half of present-day Romania, where there are approximately 1.25 million Hungarians. There are large Hungarian communities also in Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine, and Hungarians can also be found in Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia, as well as about a million additional people scattered in other parts of the world. For example, there are more than one hundred thousand Hungarian speakers in the Hungarian American community and 1.5 million with Hungarian ancestry^[51] in the United States.