HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE

                     HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE

Hungarian  is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is also spoken by communities of Hungarians in the countries that today make up Slovakia, western Ukraine , central and western Romania, northern Serbia , northern Croatia, and northern Slovenia . It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in b (particularly the united states and Canada) and in Israel. Like Finnish and Estonian, Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family.

Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family. Linguistic connections between Hungarian and other Uralic languages were noticed in the 1670s, and the family itself (then called Finno-Ugric) was established in 1717, but the classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than Turkic language continued to be a matter of impassioned political controversy throughout the 18th and into the 19th centuries. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to the Ugric branch within Uralic/Finno-Ugric, along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia , but it is no longer clear that it is a valid group. When the Samoyed languages were determined to be part of the family, it was thought at first that Finnic and Ugric (Finno-Ugric) were closer to each other than to the Samoyed branch of the family, but that now is frequently questioned.

The first written accounts of Hungarian, mostly personal name and place names, date to the 10th century. No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, as wood, the medium of writing in use at the time, was perishable.

The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1000 by Stephen I. The country became a Western-styled Christian (Roman Catholic) state, with Latin script replacing Hungarian runes. The earliest remaining fragments of the language are found in the establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from 1055, intermingled with Latin text. The first extant text fully written in Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, which dates to the 1190s. Although the orthography of these early texts differed considerably from that used today, contemporary Hungarians can still understand a great deal of the reconstructed spoken language, despite changes in grammar and vocabulary.

                                             

                                                                                                                       By
                                                                                                                    M.Vishali