Hungarian Language
The Hungarian language is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and in adjacent areas of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia (all territories lost after World War I). The Hungarian name for the language is Magyar.
There are about 14.5 million speakers, of whom 10 million live in Hungary.
Hungarian is a member of the Ugric languages, a sub-group of the Finno-Ugric language family, which in turn is a branch of the Uralic languages. Connections between the Ugric and Finnic languages were noticed in the 1670s and established, along with the entire Uralic family, in 1717, although the classification of Hungarian continued to be a matter of political controversy into the 18th and even 19th centuries. Today the Uralic family is considered one of the best demonstrated large language families, along with Indoeuropean and Austronesian.
There are numerous regular sound correspondances between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example,
Hungarian á [a ː] corresponds to Khanty [o] in certain positions, and Hungarian h [h] corresponds to Khanty [x], while Hungarian final z [z] corresponds to Khanty final [t]. For example, Hungarian ház [haːz] "house" vs. Khanty [xot] "house", and Hungarian száz [sa?z] "hundred" vs. Khanty [sot] "hundred".
The distance between the Ugric and Fennic languages is greater, but the correspondances are also regular. The relationship is most obvious when comparing all the Ugric languages with all the Fennic languages, for then individual idiosyncracies are averaged out, but here we will just compare Hungarian with Finnish.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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