The Hungarian Language

About the Hungarian Language


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The origin of the Hungarian language is one of the several mysteries that surround the early history of the Magyars. For long it has been believed that Hungarian belongs to the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family based on a relatively large number of words (~300-400) of Finno-Ugric origin in the language. Hungarian, like other Finno-Ugric languages is agglutinative, which means word meanings are modified by adding different and multiple endings or suffixes to the words, rather than using prefixes like, for example, in English. On the other hand, several linguists believe that Hungarian is related to Turkic, rather than to Finno-Ugric languages. Turkic languages are also agglutinative, but they are classified into the Altaic language family. They form a sister group with the Finno-Ugric language family, and supposedly both groups originated from the same Ural-Altaic proto-language, although this idea has also been challanged.


Others try to relate Hungarian to Sumerian, a language that was spoken in the Middle-East some nine thousand years ago. These ideas have been rejected by scientists for several reasons. The most important of these is the claim that most similarities are only superficial and that these words are not genetically related (i.e. not coming from the same ancestral words). The claimed similarities are mostly based on transcriptions of words, and not on actual phonetics of how those words were pronounced. Nevertheless, it is an undeniable fact that an ancient segment of Hungarian that has been preserved mainly in child songs, lullabies and verses, shows some degree of similarity to Sumerian. Many linguists, however, regard these old remains of an "ancient language" as of unknown origin.

The most closely related language to Hungarian is spoken on the eastern side of the Ural Mountain in western Sibiria by Khanty and Manshi people. Finnish, Estonian, and some other smaller languages within the Finno-Ugric language family are much more distantly related to Hungarian.


Despite discrepancies between the linguistic and anthropological data (for a discussion see ), the Finno-Ugric relationship has been widely accepted since Joseph Budenz, a well-trained german linguist published his exhaustive work on the Finno-Ugric words in the Hungarian. More recent analyses, however, questioned the Finno-Ugric origin of many of the words that he listed, and formed the basis of the purported relationship. Many of them now is considered to be of unknown origin, rather than Finno-Ugric. Yet, no one can deny that there is a clear and substantial Finno-Ugric segment in the Hungarian language.

HungarianEnglishFinnishKhanti
kézhandkatekaat
halfishkalakul
kéregbarkkarnakeer
énI (me)minama
háromthreekolmekoorom
nyílarrownuolenyal
lóhorsehepoluu
vízwatervetevit
vérbloodveri?

Less well known and accepted is the alternative suggestion of Turkic origin of the language. Even though this notion appeared in the scientific literature as early as the first half of the 19th century, it has never gained wide acceptance. At that time the reason was partly political, since it was not politically correct to accept relationship with "less cultured, sometimes barbaric" people living in Central-Asia. Yet, several of the explorers, linguists and other scientists who tried to find the "ancient homeland" of Hungarians were heading to Central-Asia or at least realized that the most likely place to find it is indeed somewhere between the Altai-Tien Mountains and the Aral Lake where the forests meet the endless steppe. Even Kõrösi Csoma Sándor (Alexander de Kõrösi Csoma),the author of the first Tibetan-English dictionary suggested that one should look for relatives of Hungarians north of the Tibetan plateau. Ármin Vámbéry, another well-known Turkologist of the last century suggested that Hungarian is an "ugricized" Turkic language rather than a pure Ugric language. His ideas have not received publicity for long mainly for not scientific reasons.


Hungarian contains many words of clearly Turkic origin. A certain number may have been borrowed by Hungarians from different Turkic people (Cumans, Pechenegs, Oghuz tribes)when in contact while migrating westward on the steppes, as Lajos Ligeti, a great Turkologist-Orientalist pointed out, but the origin of the largest proportion of these words can not be explained by borrowing. These words probably originated much earlier from an ancient language (Oghur Turkic) that was spoken mostly in the western part of the steppes in the early middle ages. Today only the Chuvash people in Russia speak a language belonging to this group. These words also show a general affinity to the so called Eastern-Turkic languages (see the Altaic language families) spoken in certain parts of Central-Asia, such as Kirghiz, Kazakh, and Uyghur, the language of the largest minority of China living on both sides of the Tien-Shan. These similarities clearly indicate a possible Turkic relationship of Hungarian.

HungarianEnglishKazakhUyghur
sárgayellowsaruserikh
békafrogkhurbakhapakha
szakálbeardsakalsakhal
kicsismallkishikichik
almaapplealmaalma
hattyúswanakhkhuuakh khu
énI (me)menmen
bátorcourageousbatulyesur
ikertwinyegizkhoskezak
tengerseadengiztengiz

If so, then what to do with the obviously existing Finno-Ugric similarities? Is it possible that Hungarian is an "ugricized" Turkic language? Or a "turkicized" Ugric one? Or neither one, but rather a unique mixture of both? Or these similarities developed as an ancient metalanguage to enhance communication among different human groups, as professor Gyula László suggested? There is no definite answer to these questions, and without considering other anthropological evidence, it is not even likely that such an answer will be ever found. Current research focuses on bringing together available evidence of different kinds, and synthetize them to try to find the answer to one of the oldest and most exciting questions: where did Hungarians come from?



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Last updated: 24th of July, 2000
by Gábor Lendvai