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Hungary Origins and Language
The Hungarian people are thought to have originated in
an
ancient Finno-Ugric population that originally inhabited
the
forested area between the Volga River and the Ural
Mountains.
Sometime between the first and fifth centuries A.D., after
the
Ugric and Finnic peoples had split, Ugric tribes in the
eastern
portion of the territory moved farther south,
intermingling with
nomadic Bulgar-Turkish peoples
(see Early History
, ch. 1).
Some
of these tribes settled in the Carpathian Basin in the
ninth
century A.D. and became the direct ancestors of today's
inhabitants of Hungary. The proper name for the largest
ethnic
group in Hungary is Magyar. The word is a derivative of
Megyeri,
supposedly the name of one of the original ten Magyar
tribes.
Magyar refers specifically to both the language and the
ethnic
group. The words Hungary and Hungarian are derivatives of
a
Slavicized form of the Turkic words on ogur,
meaning "ten
arrows," which may have referred to the number of Magyar
tribes.
Hungarian is the country's only official language. It
is a
member of the Finno-Ugric family of languages, unrelated
to the
Indo-European language family, which contains the major
European
languages. Within Europe, Hungarian is related to Finnish,
Estonian, Komi, and several lesser-known languages spoken
in
parts of the Ural Mountain region in the Soviet Union. It
has a
heavy admixture of Turkish, Slavic, German, Latin, and
French
words. Hungarian is written in Latin characters. The
various
dialects are intelligible to all Hungarians throughout the
country.
Data as of September 1989
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