Hungarian · Magyar

About Hungarian

Language family

Uralic, Ugric branch

Where it's spoken

Hungary

Speakers

roughly 13 million speakers

Hungarian is a Uralic language surrounded almost entirely by unrelated Indo-European (mostly Slavic and Germanic) neighbors, the result of the Magyars' migration into the Carpathian Basin around the late 9th century. Its nearest relatives, Finnish and Estonian, are distant enough that everyday conversation between speakers isn't possible, though some grammatical patterns (extensive noun cases, vowel harmony) are recognizably shared. It has no close living relative within its own borders.