Hungarian , or Magyar ( magyar nyelv , pronounced [ˈmɒɟɒr ˈɲɛlv] ), is a Uralic language of the Ugric branch spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighboring 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 ).
58-582: Bățani ( Hungarian : Nagybacon , Hungarian pronunciation : [nɒɟbɒtson] ) is a commune in Covasna County , Transylvania , Romania . It lies in the Székely Land , an ethno-cultural region in eastern Transylvania. The commune, with its center at Bățanii Mari, is composed of five villages: Aita Seacă ( Szárazajta ), Bățanii Mari ( Nagybacon ), Bățanii Mici ( Kisbacon ), Herculian ( Magyarhermány ), and Ozunca-Băi ( Uzonkafürdő ). The commune
116-615: 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"),
174-417: A circumfix , to change a word's meaning and its grammatical function. Hungarian uses vowel harmony to attach suffixes to words. That means that most suffixes have two or three different forms, and the choice between them depends on the vowels of the head word. There are some minor and unpredictable exceptions to the rule. Nouns have 18 cases , which are formed regularly with suffixes. The nominative case
232-707: 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. 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 . No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, because
290-399: A millennium. 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
348-812: 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 in the United States . Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the European Union. Hungarian is also one of the official languages of Serbian province of Vojvodina and an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia : Hodoš , Dobrovnik and Lendava , along with Slovene . Hungarian
406-406: 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
464-677: A revenge attack. Following the administrative reforms implemented by the communist regime in 1950, the commune became part of the Stalin Region , and from 1952, part of the Magyar Autonomous Region , while in 1968 it became part of Covasna County. Hungarian language 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
522-1069: A similarly dramatic way over these three centuries. 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'. These languages in turn borrowed words from Hungarian: e.g. Serbo-Croatian ašov from Hungarian ásó 'spade'. About 1.6 percent of
580-400: Is subject–verb–object (SVO). However, Hungarian is a topic-prominent language , and so has a word order that depends not only on syntax but also on the topic–comment structure of the sentence (for example, what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized). A Hungarian sentence generally has the following order: topic, comment (or focus), verb and the rest. The topic shows that
638-589: Is always on the first syllable of a word, as in Finnish and the neighbouring Slovak and Czech . There is a secondary stress on other syllables in compounds: viszontlátásra ("goodbye") is pronounced /ˈvisontˌlaːtaːʃrɒ/ . Elongated vowels in non-initial syllables may seem to be stressed to an English-speaker, as length and stress correlate in English. Hungarian is an agglutinative language . It uses various affixes , mainly suffixes but also some prefixes and
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#1732773302730696-549: Is expressed by a possessive suffix on the possessed object, rather than the possessor as in English (Peter's apple becomes Péter almája , literally 'Peter apple-his'). Noun plurals are formed with –k ( az almák 'the apples'), but after a numeral, the singular is used ( két alma 'two apples', literally 'two apple'; not *két almák ). Unlike English, Hungarian uses case suffixes and nearly always postpositions instead of prepositions. There are two types of articles in Hungarian, definite and indefinite, which roughly correspond to
754-533: Is located in the northwestern part of Covasna County , 39 km (24 mi) from the county seat, Sfântu Gheorghe , on the border with Harghita County . It lies at the foot of the Baraolt Mountains , on the banks of the Baraolt , Ozunca , and Aita rivers. During the 2002 census, Bățani had a population of 4,501, of which 3,962 of its inhabitants, or 88.02%, were ethnic Hungarians . According to
812-442: Is marked with boldface. Hungarian has a four-tiered system for expressing levels of politeness. From highest to lowest: The four-tiered system has somewhat been eroded due to the recent expansion of " tegeződés " and " önözés ". Some anomalies emerged with the arrival of multinational companies who have addressed their customers in the te (least polite) form right from the beginning of their presence in Hungary. A typical example
870-588: Is no longer clear that it is a valid group. 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. The name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of Ungrian/Ugrian , and
928-623: Is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria , Croatia , Romania , Zakarpattia in Ukraine , and Slovakia . In Romania it is a recognized minority language used at local level in communes, towns and municipalities with an ethnic Hungarian population of over 20%. The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for
986-399: Is sometimes described as having free word order, different word orders are generally not interchangeable, and the neutral order is not always correct to use. The intonation is also different with different topic-comment structures. The topic usually has a rising intonation, the focus having a falling intonation. In the following examples, the topic is marked with italics, and the focus (comment)
1044-482: 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. A more extensive body of Hungarian literature arose after 1300. The earliest known example of Hungarian religious poetry
1102-647: Is the Magyarab people , a small ethnic group located in Egypt and Sudan. Hungarian immigration patterns to Western Europe increased in the 1990s and especially since 2004, after Hungary's admission in the European Union . Thousands of Hungarians from Hungary sought available work through guest-worker contracts in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. A proposal supported by
1160-700: Is the 14th-century Lamentations of Mary . The first Bible translation was the Hussite Bible in the 1430s. 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 út ra ). 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. In 1533, Kraków printer Benedek Komjáti published Letters of St. Paul in Hungarian (modern orthography: A Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven ),
1218-532: Is the Swedish furniture shop IKEA , whose web site and other publications address the customers in te form. When a news site asked IKEA—using the te form—why they address their customers this way, IKEA's PR Manager explained in his answer—using the ön form—that their way of communication reflects IKEA's open-mindedness and the Swedish culture. However IKEA in France uses the polite ( vous ) form. Another example
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#17327733027301276-594: Is the Uralic family's largest member by number of speakers. 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
1334-485: Is the communication of Yettel Hungary (earlier Telenor, a mobile network operator) towards its customers. Yettel chose to communicate towards business customers in the polite ön form while all other customers are addressed in the less polite te form. During the first early phase of Hungarian language reforms (late 18th and early 19th centuries) more than ten thousand words were coined, several thousand of which are still actively used today (see also Ferenc Kazinczy ,
1392-407: Is unmarked ( az alma 'the apple') and, for example, the accusative is marked with the suffix –t ( az almát '[I eat] the apple'). Half of the cases express a combination of the source-location-target and surface-inside-proximity ternary distinctions (three times three cases); there is a separate case ending – ból / –ből meaning a combination of source and insideness: 'from inside of'. Possession
1450-414: The 2011 census , the commune had a population of 4,403, of which 83.08% were ethnic Hungarians, 12.24% Roma , and 1.41% Romanians ; for 3.27% of the population, the ethnicity was unknown. From a confessional point of view, most of the inhabitants were Reformed (75.15%), but there were also minorities of Pentecostals (11.83%), Roman Catholics (4.61%), and Orthodox (2.09%); for 3.5% of the population,
1508-621: The Allies ; soon after, Romanian Vânători de munte troops entered Covasna County, but were stopped by the defending Hungarian and German Armies. On 4 September 1944, around 40 retreating Romanian soldiers were captured in Szárazajta (Aita Seacă) by the locals, and were tortured and killed. On 26 September 1944, members of the irregular paramilitary Maniu Guard led by Gavril Olteanu massacred thirteen Székelys in Aita Seacă village in
1566-682: The DAHR to grant Hungarian citizenship to Hungarians living in Romania but without meeting Hungarian-law residency requirements was narrowly defeated at a 2004 referendum in Hungary. The referendum was invalid because of not enough participants. After the failure of the 2004 referendum, the leaders of the Hungarian ethnic parties in the neighboring countries formed the HTMSZF organization in January 2005, as an instrument lobbying for preferential treatment in
1624-498: The Hungarian diaspora : the first group includes those who are autochthonous to their homeland and live outside Hungary since the border changes of the post- World War I Treaty of Trianon of 1920. The victorious forces redrew the borders of Hungary so that it runs through Hungarian-majority areas. As a consequence, 3.3 million Hungarians found themselves outside the new borders. Although those Hungarians are usually not included in
1682-684: The Romanian lexicon is of Hungarian origin. 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. A 2019 study based on genetics, archaeology and linguistics, found that early Uralic speakers arrived in Europe from
1740-750: The Treaty of Trianon of 1920, it became part of the Kingdom of Romania . From 1925, Bățani belonged to plasa Baraolt, in Trei Scaune County , and from 1938, to Ținutul Argeș . After the Second Vienna Award in 1940 the commune with all of Northern Transylvania came under Hungarian control for four years. During World War II , ethnic conflicts took place in this area. After the Royal coup d'état of August 1944, Romania switched sides to
1798-845: The Volga River and the Ural Mountains . 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 ); dél 'noon; south' (cf. Chuvash tĕl vs. Turkish dial. düš ). Many words related to agriculture, state administration and even family relationships show evidence of such backgrounds. Hungarian syntax and grammar were not influenced in
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1856-786: 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 . 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
1914-575: The Finno-Ugric hypothesis was concluded the sounder of the two, mainly based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz . 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
1972-410: The Hungarian lexemes collected from technical texts, dialects etc. would total up to 1,000,000 words. Parts of the lexicon can be organized using word-bushes (see an example on the right). The words in these bushes share a common root, are related through inflection, derivation and compounding, and are usually broadly related in meaning. Hungarian diaspora There are two main groups of
2030-534: The Hungarian language contains 75,000 words, and the Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian Language (to be published in 18 volumes in the next twenty years) is planned to contain 110,000 words. The default Hungarian lexicon is usually estimated to comprise 60,000 to 100,000 words. (Independently of specific languages, speakers actively use at most 10,000 to 20,000 words, with an average intellectual using 25,000 to 30,000 words. ) However, all
2088-514: The Hungarians whose exoethnonym is usually derived from Onogurs (> (H)ungars), a Turkic tribal confederation . 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 ), as
2146-452: The Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular. 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 . In Hungarian, Iranian loanwords date back to the time immediately following the breakup of Ugric and probably span well over
2204-482: The adoption by the Hungarian government and parliament of a law making it easier to grant Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living abroad." The new citizenship law took effect on 1 January 2011. It did not grant the right to vote, even in national elections, to Hungarian citizens unless they also resided in Hungary on a permanent basis. In February 2011, the Fidesz government announced that it intended to grant
2262-643: The confessional affiliation was not known. At the 2021 census , there were 4,588 inhabitants; of those, 78.64% were Hungarians, 13.86% Roma, and 1.22% Romanians. The locality formed part of the Székely Land region of the historical Transylvania province. Until the end of World War I , it belonged to the Háromszék County of the Kingdom of Hungary . After the Hungarian–Romanian War of 1919, it passed under Romanian administration, and after
2320-465: The east, specifically from eastern Siberia. 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. Today, the consensus among linguists is that Hungarian is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than
2378-630: The equivalents in English. Adjectives precede nouns ( a piros alma 'the red apple') and have three degrees: positive ( piros 'red'), comparative ( pirosabb 'redder') and superlative ( a legpirosabb 'the reddest'). If the noun takes the plural or a case, an attributive adjective is invariable: a piros almák 'the red apples'. However, a predicative adjective agrees with the noun: az almák piros ak 'the apples are red'. Adjectives by themselves can behave as nouns (and so can take case suffixes): Melyik almát kéred? – A piros at . 'Which apple would you like? – The red one'. The neutral word order
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2436-908: The fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as Ǫgry/Ǫgrove (sg. Ǫgrinŭ ) seemed to confirm that. Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onoğur (which means ' ten arrows ' or ' ten tribes ' ). 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 [xot] ' house ' , and Hungarian száz [saːz] ' hundred ' vs. Khanty sot [sot] ' hundred ' . The distance between
2494-419: 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
2552-513: The granting of Hungarian citizenship. In 2010, some amendments were passed in Hungarian law facilitating an accelerated naturalization process for ethnic Hungarians living abroad; among other changes, the residency-in-Hungary requirement was waived. In May 2010, Slovakia announced it would strip Slovak citizenship from anyone applying for Hungarian citizenship. Romania's President Traian Băsescu declared in October 2010: "We have no objections to
2610-428: 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. The Dictate of Trianon resulted in a high proportion of Hungarians in
2668-436: 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,
2726-489: The leading figure of the Hungarian language reforms.) Kazinczy's chief goal was to replace existing words of German and Latin origins with newly created Hungarian words. As a result, Kazinczy and his later followers (the reformers) significantly reduced the formerly high ratio of words of Latin and German origins in the Hungarian language, which were related to social sciences, natural sciences, politics and economics, institutional names, fashion etc. Giving an accurate estimate for
2784-448: 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
2842-574: The most part, mutually intelligible . The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csángó Hungarian group has been largely isolated from other Hungarian people , and therefore preserved features that closely resemble earlier forms of Hungarian. Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes and 25 consonant phonemes. The vowel phonemes can be grouped as pairs of short and long vowels such as o and ó . Most of
2900-553: The name of the country, " Magyarország " (Hungary), pronounced /ˈmɒɟɒrorsaːɡ/ . It is one of three palatal consonants, the others being ⟨ty⟩ and ⟨ny⟩ . Historically a fourth palatalized consonant ʎ existed, still written ⟨ly⟩ . A single 'r' is pronounced as an alveolar tap ( akkora 'of that size'), but a double 'r' is pronounced as an alveolar trill ( akkorra 'by that time'), like in Spanish and Italian . Primary stress
2958-407: The new information for the listeners that may not have been known or that their knowledge must be corrected. For example, "Én vagyok az apád". ('I am your father'. Literally, 'It is I who am your father'.), from the movie The Empire Strikes Back , the pronoun I ( én ) is in the focus and implies that it is new information, and the listener thought that someone else is his father. Although Hungarian
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#17327733027303016-478: The number to reach about half a million by the end of the year. Hungarian citizens abroad have been able to participate in the parliamentary elections without Hungarian residency starting from the 2014 Hungarian parliamentary election , however, they cannot vote for a candidate running for the seat in a single-seat constituency, but for a party list. Since the Hungarian diaspora could start voting in elections in Hungary from 2012, they have overwhelmingly supported
3074-485: The pairs have an almost similar pronunciation and vary significantly only in their duration. However, pairs a / á and e / é differ both in closedness and length. Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian. Most consonant phonemes can occur as geminates . The sound voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ , written ⟨gy⟩ , sounds similar to 'd' in British English 'duty'. It occurs in
3132-411: The proposition is only for that particular thing or aspect, and it implies that the proposition is not true for some others. For example, in " Az almát János látja". ('It is John who sees the apple'. Literally 'The apple John sees.'), the apple is in the topic, implying that other objects may be seen by not him but other people (the pear may be seen by Peter). The topic part may be empty. The focus shows
3190-417: The right to vote to its new citizens. Between 2011 and 2012, 200,000 applicants took advantage of the new, accelerated naturalization process; there were another 100,000 applications pending in the summer of 2012. As of February 2013, the Hungarian government had granted citizenship to almost 400,000 Hungarians ‘beyond the borders’. In June 2013, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén announced that he expected
3248-414: The surrounding 7 countries, so it is widely spoken or understood. Although host countries are not always considerate of Hungarian language users, communities are strong. The Szeklers , for example, form their own region and have their own national museum, educational institutions, and hospitals. Hungarian has about 13 million native speakers, of whom more than 9.8 million live in Hungary. According to
3306-571: The term "Hungarian diaspora", they are listed as such in this article. The other main group is the emigrants who left Hungary at various times (such as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 ). There has been some emigration since Hungary joined the EU in 2004, especially to countries such as Germany, but those patterns have been less extensive than for certain other countries of Central Europe such as Poland and Slovakia . Additionally, there
3364-517: The total word count is difficult, since it is hard to define a "word" in agglutinating languages, due to the existence of affixed words and compound words. To obtain a meaningful definition of compound words, it is necessary to exclude compounds whose meaning is the mere sum of its elements. The largest dictionaries giving translations from Hungarian to another language contain 120,000 words and phrases (but this may include redundant phrases as well, because of translation issues) . The new desk lexicon of
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