Hungarian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Fourteen million people speak Hungarian, and that single fact makes it the most widely spoken language of the entire Uralic family. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Yet its closest living relatives are the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia, half a continent away. How did a tongue born near the Ural Mountains end up in the heart of Europe? Why does it have 18 noun cases, two separate words for the color red, and a four-tiered system just for politeness? Genetic studies of ethnic Hungarians have turned up Y-DNA haplogroups most common in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. Some researchers read these as traces of a westward migration from regions near eastern Siberia and Mongolia, roughly 4,500 years ago, toward the Carpathian Basin. The story of this language is the story of that long journey, written into its grammar, its loanwords, and even its words for north and south.

• 2. The Long Road West

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  Iranian loanwords sit in the oldest layer of Hungarian, words like tehen for cow, tiz for ten, and naer reed. They date to roughly the time the Ugric family broke apart, and they probably span well over a thousand years. The traditional view places that split in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, east of the southern Urals in western Siberia. Archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan confirms Hungarian settlements between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. There the language met the Onogurs and Bulgars, whose influence ran deep between the 5th and 9th centuries. This Turkic layer is large and varied, and it reached into farming, government, and even family relationships, though it left the syntax and grammar largely untouched across those three centuries. The Chuvash people, the only surviving member of the Oghur tribes, left a visible mark; Hungarians appear to have learned animal husbandry from Oghur-speaking Chuvash, since a high proportion of livestock and agriculture words are of Chuvash origin. A strong Chuvash influence even showed in Hungarian burial customs. After the Hungarians reached the Carpathian Basin, the language brushed against Slavic, Turkic, and German speech communities. About 20 percent of Hungarian loanwords come from neighboring Slavic languages, including mak for poppy seed and karacsony for Christmas. The traffic ran both ways: Serbo-Croatian borrowed asov from the Hungarian aso, meaning spade.

• 3. The Ugric-Turkic War

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  Az ugor-torok haboru, the Ugric-Turkic war, was the name given to an academic debate that decided where Hungarian truly belonged. For much of the 18th and into the 19th century, the question carried real political heat. During the latter half of the 19th century, one camp argued for a Turkic affinity, and another for a vast Ural-Altaic superfamily joining the Uralic and Turkic worlds. The Finno-Ugric hypothesis was judged the sounder of the two, leaning mainly on the work of the German linguist Josef Budenz. Linguistic connections between Hungarian and other Uralic languages were first noticed in the 1670s, and the family's existence was established in 1717. Today the Uralic family ranks among the most firmly established and best-studied language families in the world, and the consensus places Hungarian inside it. The name of Hungary itself sits at the edge of this argument. It may come from regular sound changes of Ungrian, supported by the fact that Eastern Slavs called Hungarians Ogry. Current scholarship favors a different source: the name of the Turkic tribal confederation Onogur.

• 4. From Runes To Print

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  The first written traces of Hungarian appear in the 10th century, as personal and place names in De Administrando Imperio, written in Greek by the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VII. Before that, the language used the Old Hungarian script, an alphabetic system believed to derive from the Old Turkic script and written right to left. No significant texts in that script survived, because the writing medium of the time, wood, is perishable. The founding of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1000 by Stephen I turned the country into a Western-styled Roman Catholic state, and the Latin alphabet gradually replaced the old runes. The earliest surviving fragments of the language sit inside the establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from 1055, scattered among Latin text. The first text written entirely in Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, dating to the 1190s. A larger body of literature arose after 1300, including the 14th-century Lamentations of Mary, the earliest known Hungarian religious poetry, and the Hussite Bible of the 1430s, the first Bible translation. In 1533 the Krakow printer Benedek Komjati published the first Hungarian-language book set in movable type. The language also shed pieces of itself along the way: it once used six verb tenses, where today only two or three remain.

• 5. Ten Thousand New Words

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  Ferenc Kazinczy led a movement in the 19th century called nyelvujitas, a deliberate renewal of the language. His chief goal was to replace words of German and Latin origin with newly minted Hungarian ones. The reformers shortened existing words, turning gyozedelem into gyozelem for victory. They spread dialectal words nationally, such as cselleng for dawdle, and reintroduced extinct words like disz for decor. The movement produced more than ten thousand words, and most of them are still in active use today. This reshaping had a measurable effect: it sharply reduced the once-high ratio of Latin and German words tied to the social sciences, natural sciences, politics, and economics. Counting the size of the resulting lexicon is genuinely hard, because in an agglutinating language even the definition of a word is slippery. The new desk lexicon of Hungarian holds 75,000 words, and the Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian Language is planned to run to 110,000 words across 18 volumes. Estimates of the default lexicon land between 60,000 and 100,000 words, while every collected lexeme from technical texts and dialects would total around a million.

• 6. A Language Of Suffixes

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  Eighteen noun cases, all formed regularly with suffixes, give Hungarian its reputation as an agglutinative language. The nominative case goes unmarked, as in az alma for the apple, while the accusative adds a -t, giving az almat. Half of those cases pack two ideas at once, combining source, location, and target with a sense of surface, inside, or proximity. There is even a single ending, -bol or -bol, that means from inside of. Possession lands on the thing possessed rather than the possessor, so Peter's apple becomes Peter almaja, literally Peter apple-his. Vowel harmony governs which form of a suffix a word takes, so most suffixes carry two or three variants chosen by the vowels of the head word. Hungarian nouns and pronouns carry no gender at all; there is only one class. The reach of this system is dizzying. The word fiu, meaning boy, can stack vowel-form suffixes into fiaiei, his sons' in the plural object, a word that is actually used. Showmen of the language have pushed further, building megszentsegtelenithetetlensegeskedeseitekert, meaning for your repeated pretending to be indesecratable. Such words are not compounds but a single root, szent meaning holy, buried under a cascade of suffixes.

• 7. Reading The Sun And The Blood

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  North in Hungarian is eszak, drawn from ej for night, because the sun never shines from the north. South is del, which also means noon, since that is when the sun shines from the south. East, kelet, comes from the rising of the sun, and west, nyugat, from its setting. The compass itself is a map of the sky over the Northern Hemisphere. Color works the same way, splitting where most languages hold one word. Hungarian keeps two basic words for red, piros and voros, and voros is tied to ver, meaning blood. Children learn piros first, used for inanimate, artificial, or cheerful things, while voros covers animate or natural things and emotionally charged subjects. The distinction is precise enough that scholars often treat Hungarian as unique in recognizing two shades of red as separate folk colors. A red traffic light is piros, but the Red Army, the Red Cross, and red wine are all voros. Kinship runs along the same logic of fine distinction. Brothers and sisters are named by relative age, and the general word for sibling, testver, comes from test for body and ver for blood, meaning those from the same body and blood. Separate prefixes stretch back across ded and uk and szep to mark each generation of ancestors and descendants.

• 8. Speakers Across Borders

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  Seventy-one percent of its territory and one-third of its ethnic Hungarian population is what Hungary lost when it signed the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. That single act scattered Hungarian speakers across the region, which is why the language is widely spoken or understood in seven surrounding countries. The largest group beyond Hungary lives in Transylvania, the western half of present-day Romania, with roughly 1.25 million Hungarians. Sizable communities also remain in Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine, alongside speakers in Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia. Diaspora communities reach North America and Israel; the United States alone holds more than one hundred thousand Hungarian speakers and 1.5 million people of Hungarian ancestry. Inside Hungary, the 2011 census recorded 9,896,333 speakers, about 99.6 percent of the population. The language holds official status nationally in Hungary and regionally in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Austria, and Slovenia. In Romania it is recognized at the local level where the ethnic Hungarian population exceeds 20 percent. The communities stay strong even where host countries are not always considerate; the Szeklers, for instance, maintain their own region, their own national museum, schools, and hospitals. By 2014 the proportion of Transylvanian students studying Hungarian had passed that of Hungarian students, a sign that the long pressure of Romanianization was beginning to reverse.