Hungarians call their language Magyar. Although Hungary is located in Central Europe, Hungarian is not related to any of the languages that surround it. The only other languages to which Hungarian is closely related are Khanty and Mansi, minority languages of Russia, spoken 2,000 miles away, east of the Ural mountains in northwestern Siberia. This linguistic relationship shows that the original Hungarian people came from Asia. After having lived a nomadic life on the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains, they are thought to have migrated westward in the 5th- 6th centuries AD, and eventuallyto have settled in the Danube basin west of the Carpathian Mountains in the 9th century. Over the centuries, the Hungarians have become assimilated into the surrounding European cultures. Only their language testifies to their origin in Asia.

Hungarian is spoken by 10.5 million people in Hungary, or by 98% of the population. There are also sizable populations of Hungarian speakers in Romania (2 million), the Czech and Slovak Republics (600,000), the former Yugoslavia (450,000), Ukraine (170,000), Israel (150,000), U.S. (450,000). Smaller pockets of Hungarian speakers also live in Canada, Slovenia, and Austria (Ethnologue).

Hungarian is the only official language of education and government administration in present-day Hungary.

Click on the MLA Interactive Language Map to find out where Hungarian is spoken in the U.S.

Much of early Hungarian history was recorded in runic writings carved into stone, clay, leather and wood. When Saint Stephen, First Christian King of Hungary, converted the Magyar people to Catholicism, he ordered all runic writings to be destroyed. As a result, very few runic writings have survived. Click here to learn more about ancientHungarian runic writing.

Hungarian is written with the Latin alphabet. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several additional letters. These include vowels with acute accents [á, é, í, ó, ú] which represent long vowels, the diaereses ö and ü, and their long counterparts õ and û.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights in Hungarian.

1. Do you recognize any words?
2. Can you infer the meaning of the word emberi from looking at the two contexts in which it occurs?
3. Can you figure out the composition of the title if
   az "it"
   jogok "rights, liberties"
   egyetemes "universal"
   nyilatkozata "statement"

Hungarian words in English

Did you know that these words came from Hungarian, sometimes by way of other languages?

Hungarian Language Learning Resources
Course Offerings for the Less Commonly Taught Languages
UCLA Language Materials Project
UCLA Language Materials Project -- Hungarian Profile
Yamada Language Center Guides
Hungarian Language Resources
Cambridge University Language Centre
The Slavic and East European Language Resource Center