Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family and is assigned to its Ugric branch, alongside the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia. Linguistic connections to other Uralic languages were first noticed in the 1670s, and the family's existence was established in 1717.
Hungarian has about 14 million speakers, making it the most widely spoken language of the Uralic family. More than 9.8 million live in Hungary, and the 2011 census recorded 9,896,333 speakers there, about 99.6 percent of the population.
Outside Hungary, Hungarian is spoken in southern Slovakia, western Ukraine, central and western Romania, northern Serbia, northern Croatia, northeastern Slovenia, and eastern Austria. The largest community abroad is in Transylvania in present-day Romania, with roughly 1.25 million Hungarians, and diaspora communities reach North America and Israel.
Hungarian is an agglutinative language, so it has 18 noun cases formed regularly with suffixes. Half of these cases combine a source, location, or target meaning with a sense of surface, inside, or proximity, and the language relies on suffixes and postpositions rather than prepositions.
Hungarian keeps two basic words for red, piros and voros, and many scholars treat it as unique in recognizing two shades of red as separate folk colors. Children learn piros first for inanimate or cheerful things, while voros, related to ver meaning blood, covers natural and emotionally charged subjects such as the Red Cross and red wine.
The Ugric-Turkic war, or Az ugor-torok haboru, was a 19th-century academic debate over whether Hungarian was a Uralic or a Turkic language. The Finno-Ugric hypothesis was judged the sounder of the two, based mainly on the work of the German linguist Josef Budenz.
In 1920 Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon and lost 71 percent of its territory and one-third of its ethnic Hungarian population. This scattered Hungarian speakers across seven surrounding countries, where the language remains widely spoken or understood.