Magyar Language
Hermalindo Lepicier
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 is the Uralic family's largest member by number of speakers.[4]
The name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of Ungrian/Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as Ǫgry/Ǫgrove (sg. Ǫgrinŭ) seemed to confirm that.[11] Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onoğur (which means "ten arrows" or "ten tribes").[12][13][14]
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 hz [haːz] "house" vs. Khanty xot [xot] "house", and Hungarian szz [saːz] "hundred" vs. Khanty sot [sot] "hundred". The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular.
Archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.[17] 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. sz "word", from Turkic; and daru "crane", from the related Permic languages), and includes words borrowed from Oghur Turkic; e.g. borj "calf" (cf. Chuvash păru, părăv vs. Turkish buzağı);[18] dl 'noon; south' (cf. Chuvash tĕl vs. Turkish dial. dš).[19] Many words related to agriculture,[20] state administration and even family relationships show evidence of such backgrounds.[citation needed] Hungarian syntax and grammar were not influenced in a similarly dramatic way over these three centuries.[citation needed]
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 the Hungarians whose exoethnonym is usually derived from Onogurs (> (H)ungars), a Turkic tribal confederation.[30] 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[31]), as 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.[32] No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, because 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 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.[citation needed]
A more extensive body of Hungarian literature arose after 1300. The earliest known example of Hungarian religious poetry is the 14th-century Lamentations of Mary. The first Bible translation was the Hussite Bible in the 1430s.[33][34]
The standard language lost its diphthongs, and several postpositions transformed into suffixes, including re "onto" (the phrase utu rea "onto the way" found in the 1055 text would later become tra). 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.[35][note 1]
In 1533, Krakw printer Benedek Komjti published Letters of St. Paul in Hungarian [hu] (modern orthography: A Szent Pl levelei magyar nyelven), 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 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. [36] The Dictate of Trianon resulted in a high proportion of Hungarians in the surrounding 7 countries, so it is widely spoken or understood. Although host countries are not always considerate of Hungarian language users,[37][38][39] 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[48][49][50] native speakers, of whom more than 9.8 million live in Hungary. According to 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.[40] 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 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[51] 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 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%.[52]
The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alfld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Szkely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Hungarian Csng dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csng 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 . Most of the pairs have an almost similar pronunciation and vary significantly only in their duration. However, pairs a/ and e/ differ both in closedness and length.
Primary stress 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: viszontltsra ("goodbye") is pronounced /ˈvisontˌlaːtaːʃrɒ/. Elongated vowels in non-initial syllables may seem to be stressed to an English-speaker,[citation needed] as length and stress correlate in English.
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.
The topic shows that 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 almt Jnos ltja". ('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 the new information for the listeners that may not have been known or that their knowledge must be corrected. For example, "n vagyok az apd". ('I am your father'. Literally, 'It is I who am your father'.), from the movie The Empire Strikes Back, the pronoun I (n) is in the focus and implies that it is new information, and the listener thought that someone else is his father.
Although Hungarian 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) is marked with boldface.
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