Hungarian | |
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magyar, magyar nyelv | |
Pronunciation | [ˈmɒɟɒr] |
Native to | Hungary and areas of east Austria, Croatia, Poland, Romania, northern Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, western Ukraine. |
Ethnicity | Hungarians |
Native speakers
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13 million (2002–2012) |
Uralic
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Latin (Hungarian alphabet) Hungarian Braille Old Hungarian script |
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Official status | |
Official language in
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Hungary European Union |
Recognised minority
language in |
Romania
Serbia (in Vojvodina) Croatia Slovakia Slovenia (in Prekmurje) Austria (in Burgenland) Ukraine (in Beregove, Mukachevo, Vinogradovo and Uzhgorod districts of Transkarpation region (Zakarpatska Oblast) |
Regulated by | Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | hu |
ISO 639-2 | hun |
ISO 639-3 | Either: – Modern Hungarian – Old Hungarian |
ohu Old Hungarian |
|
Glottolog | hung1274 |
Linguasphere | 41-BAA-a |
Regions of Central Europe where those whose mother tongue is Hungarian represent a majority (dark blue) and a minority (light blue). Based on recent censuses and on the CIA World Factbook 2014
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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 neighbouring countries (especially in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia), and by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide. Like Finnish and Estonian, it belongs to the Uralic language family, its closest relatives being Mansi and Khanty. It is the most widely-spoken of the several European languages not part of the Indo-European family.
The Hungarian name for the language is magyar [ˈmɒɟɒr] or magyar nyelv ( listen ). The word "" is used as an English and Hungarian word to refer to Hungarian people as an ethnic group.
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, but the classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than Turkic language continued to be a matter of impassioned political controversy throughout the 18th and into the 19th centuries. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to an Ugric branch within Uralic/Finno-Ugric, along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia (Khanty–Mansia region), but it is no longer clear that it 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 that now is frequently questioned.