Why Is Hungarian So Different? – History And Relatives | Hu How?

In Europe, most languages are related to each other. English is related to Polish, French to Greek, Norwegian to Albanian, Irish Gaelic to Armenian. Granted, these relationships are quite far, they have been proved with linguistic tools. Slavic, Germanic, Romance etc. are all Indo-European languages, descended from a common ancestor language spoken about 6 thousand years ago. As each new generation changes a slight bit on the words and grammar of their parents, languages change. Though not planned, this can totally scramble up a language over the millennia. When a group of people split, they gradually scramble their languages in different directions so when they meet each other again, they have no idea what the other is trying to say. Luckily, basic words (of body parts or family) tend to remain in use for a long time and sounds often change in consistent patterns, like replacing all p sounds with an f. This has helped linguists to uncover the family tree of languages. So what’s the deal with Hungarian?

Isn’t Hungarian a Slavic language?

Not only is it not Slavic, Hungarian is not even in the Indo-European family. However, if we look far and careful enough we can find some cousin languages, Finnish for instance. This language family is called Uralic. (Uralic and Indo-European may or may not descend from an even earlier common ancestor language, there is no decisive evidence either way.)

Forest near the Ural mountains. Foggy as our knowledge about those times. (Source: flickr.com, Foggy forest by Nick, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

So Hungarian is like Finnish?

Well, let’s take a look at a famous quote from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, “No, I am your father” in Hungarian

Nem, én vagyok az apád.

and in Finnish

Ei, minä olen isäsi.

Not very similar, are they? And it’s not specific to this sentence. The reason is that the ancestors of Finnish and Hungarian went on separate scramble-up journeys around 4 thousand years ago, around the time when the Stonehenge was built. Mutual intelligibility is at 0% today. The similarities are so obscure to the naive layman that it took until the 20th century to establish a solid consensus that the two are indeed distant cousins and some fringe theorist groups still don’t believe it today. Did those ancient peoples not care to tell their children and grandchildren where they came from? Or did the stories get twisted around as in that game called Chinese whispers? Anyway, it had to be rediscovered. Medieval legends didn’t talk about relations between languages, rather about relations of whole nations. They claimed that Hungarians were descendants of the Huns but now we know this isn’t true. The similarity in the name is a coincidence.

Back to reality. The Uralic family is named after the mountains where it was perhaps first spoken, and it includes more than just Hungarian and Finnish, though it’s still relatively small. While Indo-European languages are spoken by billions of people, the Uralic family only has around 25 million speakers and even most of those are the Hungarians themselves (around 50-55%). Further languages in the family are Estonian and some small ones in Russia, many of which are threatened from extinction.

I think after this intro, it can be rightly expected that this language will have some unique and unusual ways to express things.

A hole in the map

The main language families of the world. Source: PiMaster3. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Migration of Hungarians (Source: Fakirbakir CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Notice that dark spot in the middle of Europe? Not only is the language quite unusual, it’s right in the middle of another family! How come? Although this is not a history blog, the answer lies in the past and we’ll go after it. We need to fast forward from Stonehenge times to the 9th century CE. This is a big jump, we are skipping over the ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire and arrive at the time of Charlemagne and the invention of the concept of zero in India. Over this long period, the Hungarians moved westward. They were perhaps a couple hundred thousand people led by Árpád when they arrived to the Carpathian Basin, where they founded the Principality of Hungary. These times are called the Dark Ages for a reason: we have very little knowledge of what was going on exactly. Many peoples and languages roamed this region before and most have disappeared. Hungarian has become an exception and the language is still spoken by millions today.

How Hungarian secured its status

Flag of the Árpádians, the first Hungarian royal dynasty (Source: Sir Iain – via Wikimedia Commons)

Why did Hungarian survive where Avar, Hunnic and more have gone extinct? The reason has probably something to do with the radical change in how Hungarians organized themselves around 1000 CE. These nomadic warriors, who were leading fierce campaigns in Western Europe, decided to settle down and create a Christian kingdom endorsed by the pope, as customary at the time. They created a royal dynasty, the Árpádians, called after the head of the tribes who led them to the new home. It was a success. Fast forward some centuries and virtually all European monarchs have ancestors among the Árpádians. Take Elizabeth II, for instance. Árpád was one of her great-great-great-…-great grandfathers, precisely 34 generations back: from Elizabeth, go 21 times to the father’s side, then mother, father, mother, then again 10 times father and you arrive at Árpád. Seriously.

Anyway, the Hungarian language survived and has been passing on from generation to generation in Hungary. It survived the Ottoman occupation (1526-1711), the Germanization efforts of Joseph II of the Habsburgs (even making German official) and many other events – fortunately enough, otherwise you couldn’t be here learning (about) it!

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