Hungarian Voice Over Agency

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is also spoken by communities of Hungarian people in neighboring countries—especially in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine—and by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide. Like Finnish and Estonian, it belongs to the Uralic language family, with its closest relatives being Mansi and Khanty. It is one of the few languages of Europe that are not part of the Indo-European family.

The Hungarian name for the language is magyar. The word “Magyar” is also used as an English word to refer to Hungarian people as an ethnic group, or to the language.

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 (then called Finno-Ugric) was established in 1717, though the classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than Turkic language continued to be a matter of impassioned political controversy through the 18th and into the 19th centuries. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to a Ugric branch within Uralic/Finno-Ugric, along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of westernSiberia (Khanty–Mansia region), but it is no longer clear that this 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 (Finno-Ugric) were closer to each other than to the Samoyed branch of the family, but this position is currently considered questionable.

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. Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onogur (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 the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular.

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 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 inAustria, 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 first printed Hungarian book was published in Kraków in 1533, byBenedek Komjáti. The work’s title is Az Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven (In original spelling: Az zenth Paal leueley magyar nyeluen), i.e. The letters of Saint Paul in the Hungarian language. In the 17th century, the language was already very similar to its present-day form, although two of the past tenses were still used. German, Italian and French loans also appeared in the language by these years. Further Turkish words were borrowed during the Ottoman rule of part of Hungary between 1541 and 1699.

In the 18th century a group of writers, most notably Ferenc Kazinczy, began the process of language renewal (Hungarian: nyelvújítás). Some words were shortened (győzedelem > győzelem, ‘triumph’ or ‘victory’); 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 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 the mutually comprehensible dialects gradually lessened. In 1920, by signing the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost 71% of its territory, and along with these, 33% of the ethnic Hungarian population. Today, the language is official in Hungary, and regionally also in Romania, in Slovakia, in Serbia, in Austria and in Slovenia.