Hungarian

From The D Archives

Hungarian (magyar nyelv) is a Finno-Ugric language, and more specifically a Ugric language, unrelated to the other languages of Central Europe. As one of the small number of modern European languages which do not belong to the Indo-European language family, it has always been of great interest to linguists. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar [ˈmɒɟɒr̪].

There are about 13 million native speakers, of whom 9.5-10 million live in modern-day Hungary. Some two million speakers live in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before World War I. Of these, the largest group live in Romania, where there are approximately 1.4 million Hungarians (see Hungarian minority in Romania). Hungarian-speaking people are also to be found in Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia, as well as about a million people scattered in other parts of the world.