The origin of the Hungarian language is one of the several mysteries that surround the early history of this nation. 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 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 Turkish, rather than to Finno-Ugric languages. Turkish 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.
Other theories 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. The claimed similarities are mostly based on transcriptions of words, and not on actual phonetics how those words were actually pronounced. Nevertheless, it is an undeniable fact that an ancient segment of the language, 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 Vogul and Ostjak people. Surprisingly, these people are Mongoloid and not Caucasoid as Hungarians are. Also, they are very different from Hungarians in many other anthropological aspects, such as in their culture, art, their music, etc. Clearly they can not be the closest relatives of Hungarians. Finnish, Estonian, and some other smaller languages within the Finno-Ugric language family are much more distantly related to Hungarian.
Yet despite all these contradictions, the Finno-Ugric relationship has been widely accepted within the country as well as abroad. More recent analyses, however, started to question the Finno-Ugric origin of several words that formed the basis of such a classification. Many of them is considered now 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.
Less well known and accepted is the alternative suggestion of Turkish origin of the language. Even though this notion appeared in the scientific literature as early as in 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" Turkish language rather than a pure Ugric language. His theory has not even received publicity for long.
Hungarian contains also many words of clearly Turkish origin. A certain number may have been borrowed by Hungarians from different Turkish people when in contact while migrating westward on the steppes, as Lajos Ligeti, a great Turkologist-Orientalist pointed out, but the origin of a certain proportion of the words can not be explained by borrowing. These words probably originated much earlier. Many of them show a strong affinity to the so called Eastern-Turkish languages (see the Altaic language families) spoken in certain parts of Central-Asia. One of them is Uyghur, the language of the largest minority of China living on both sides of the Tien-Shan. These similarities clearly indicate a possible, but not too strong Turkish relation of Hungarian, but then what to do with the obviously existing Finno-Ugric similarities? Would Hungarian be neither purely Turkish, nor purely Ugric, 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?