In Budapest, a short word like víz means “water“, and kéz – “hand“. To most Europeans, they do not resemble either Slavic, Germanic, or Romance languages. The reason is that Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family – different from the Indo-European group, to which the languages of almost all its neighbors belong.
However, this does not mean that Hungarian has no relatives. It is part of the Ugric branch along with the Khanty and Mansi languages, which are spoken in Western Siberia. Finnish and Estonian are also related, but from a different, Finno-Ugric branch. The ancestors of these languages diverged thousands of years ago, and Hungarian became further separated after the ancestors of the Hungarians moved westward and reached the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century.
There are relatives, but the similarities are hidden
The distance between the languages is most clearly visible in the vocabulary. The Hungarian víz is related to the Estonian vesi, and kéz is related to the Finnish käsi. The Hungarian élni („I live“) and menni („I go“) also have Estonian equivalents. But sound changes over the millennia, a different historical path, and loanwords have made these connections difficult to see for non-specialists.
“Hungarian has never been removed from the family tree of the Uralic languages,“ Finno-Ugric philologist Bogata Timar told Estonian public radio ERR. According to her, scholars reached an agreement on the language's place in the Uralic family more than a century ago, although the topic periodically sparks controversy in Hungary.
Words are built like a building of suffixes
Hungarian is an agglutinative language. This means that grammatical information is added to the root through a series of suffixes. A word can simultaneously indicate number, possession, direction, and location, rather than these relationships being expressed by separate prepositions and words.
A language often distinguishes 17 cases, although the number depends on how the system is analyzed. They can indicate whether something is inside an object, on a surface, towards a place, or near it. Nouns do not change according to grammatical gender – there are no separate masculine, feminine, and neuter genders as in Bulgarian, German, or French.
Another distinguishing feature is vowel harmony. The suffix is chosen according to the vowels in the root, so that the word maintains a certain sound balance. Hungarian has about 14-15 vowels, and the stress usually falls on the first syllable.
The language preserves traces of a long journey
Hungarian grammar bears the Uralic heritage, but the vocabulary also tells about the historical contacts of the people. It contains early borrowings from Iranian and Turkic languages, accumulated during the migrations of the Hungarians. After their settlement in Central Europe, words from Slavic, German, Italian, French and English came.
This is how a language is formed that is both ancient in its basic structure and changed by numerous contacts. It does not completely resemble Finnish or Estonian, but shares grammatical features and old words with them. It is this combination that makes Hungarian the largest language island in Europe – not a language without a family, but a language whose family ties have remained hidden behind centuries of change.
Sources: news.err.ee, amp.dw.com