History of the Hungarian language
| Old Hungarian | |
|---|---|
| Region | Medieval Hungary |
| Extinct | developed into Early Modern Hungarian by the 16th century |
|
Uralic
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
ohu |
|
| Glottolog | None |
Hungarian is a Uralic language of the Ugric group. It has been spoken in the region of modern-day Hungary since the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century.
The predecessor language of Hungarian separated from the Ob-Ugric languages, probably still during the Bronze Age. There is no attestation for a period of close to two millennia. Old Hungarian is attested fragmentarily in epigraphy in the Old Hungarian script beginning in the 10th century, and isolated Hungarian words are attested in manuscript tradition from the turn of the 11th century. The oldest surviving coherent text in Old Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, dated to 1192.
The Old Hungarian period is by convention taken to cover Medieval Hungary, from the invasion of Pannonia in AD 896, to the collapse of the Kingdom of Hungary following the Battle of Mohács of 1526. A Middle Hungarian phase is by convention taken to last from 1526 to 1772, i.e. from the first books printed in Hungarian to the Age of Enlightenment, which prompted language reforms that resulted in the modern literary Hungarian language.
The happenings of the 1530s and 1540s brought a new situation to the country: the time of Humanism – which only a few decades earlier, under Matthias of Hungary flourished – was over; the population, both in villages and towns, was terrorized by Ottoman raids; the majority of the country was lost; and the remainder began to feel the problems of the new Habsburg rule. This predicament caused backwardness in the cultural life as well.
However, Hungary, with the previously listed great territorial and human losses, soon entered into a new cultural era, the Protestant Reformation. This religious movement heartened many authors to find new ways. Cultural life was primarily based in Transylvania, but Royal Hungary also saw the rebirth of the Hungarian culture.
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Wikipedia