Hunnic language
| Hunnic | |
|---|---|
| Region | from Eurasian steppe into Europe |
| Extinct | after 5th century CE |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
xhc |
| Glottolog | None |
The Hunnic language, or Hunnish, was the language spoken by Huns in the Hunnic Empire, a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic tribal confederation which ruled much of Eastern Europe and invaded the West during the 4th and 5th centuries. A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun Empire.A contemporary reports that Hunnish was spoken alongside Gothic and the languages of other tribes subjugated by the Huns.
Evidence for the language is very limited, consisting almost entirely of proper names. The Hunnic language cannot be classified at present, but due to the origin of these proper names it has been compared mainly with Turkic and Mongolian.
Contemporary observers of the European Huns, such as Priscus and the 6th century historian Jordanes, preserved three words of the language of the Huns:
In the villages we were supplied with food - millet instead of corn - and medos as the natives call it. The attendants who followed us received millet and a drink of barley, which the barbarians call kamos.
When the Huns had mourned him [Attila] with such lamentations, a strava, as they call it, was celebrated over his tomb with great revelling.
The words medos, a beverage akin to mead, kamos, a barley drink, and strava, a funeral feast, are of satemised Indo-European origin. They may be of Slavic, but also Germanic and Iranian origin. Maenchen-Helfen argued that strava may have come from an informant who spoke Slavic.
Many of the waves of nomadic peoples who swept into Eastern Europe, are known to have spoken languages from a variety of families. Several proposals for the affinities of Hunnic have been made.
A number of historians and linguists including Peter Heather and Karl Heinrich Menges feel that the proper names only allow the Hunnic language to be positioned in the broad group of Altaic languages. Heather argued that "opinions differ even over their linguistic affiliation, but the best guess would seem to be that the Huns were the first group of Turkic, as opposed to Iranian, nomads to have intruded into Europe". Although Menges was also reserved towards the language evidence, his view of the Huns was that "there are ethnological reasons for considering them Turkic or close to the Turks".
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