Hungarian

Hungarian is spoken by 10.5 million people in Hungary, or by 98% of the population. There are also sizable populations of Hungarian speakers in Romania (2 million), the Czech and Slovak Republics (600,000), the former Yugoslavia (450,000), Ukraine (170,000), Israel (150,000), U.S. (450,000). Smaller pockets of Hungarian speakers also live in Canada, Slovenia, and Austria (Ethnologue).

Hungarians call their language Magyar. Although Hungary is located in Central Europe, Hungarian is not related to any of the languages that surround it. The only other languages to which Hungarian is closely related are Khanty and Mansi, minority languages of Russia, spoken 2,000 miles away, east of the Ural mountains in northwestern Siberia. This linguistic relationship shows that the original Hungarian people came from Asia. After having lived a nomadic life on the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains, they are thought to have migrated westward in the 5th-6th centuries AD, and eventually to have settled in the Danube basin west of the Carpathian Mountains in the 9th century. Over the centuries, the Hungarians have become assimilated into the surrounding European cultures. Only their language testifies to their origin in Asia.

Hungarian is the only official language of education and government administration in present-day Hungary.

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