Hungarian (
magyar nyelv 
listen (help·info)) is a
Uralic language (more specifically an
Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in
Europe. It is mainly spoken in
Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is
magyar (
Hungarian pronunciation&_160;['m???r?]), which is also occasionally used as an English noun, such as
Mighty Magyars.
There are about 14.5 million native speakers, of whom 9.5–10 million live in modern-day Hungary. A further two million speakers live outside present-day Hungary, but in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon (1920). Of these, the largest group lives 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 (see Geographic distribution). There are hundreds of thousands of Hungarian speakers in the Hungarian American community in the United States.
Hungarian is a Uralic language, more specifically a Ugric language; the most closely related languages are Mansi and Khanty of western Siberia. Connections between the Ugric and Finnic languages were noticed in the 1670s and established, along with the entire Uralic family in 1717, although the classification of Hungarian continued to be a matter of political controversy into the 18th and even 19th centuries. Today the Uralic family is considered one of the best demonstrated large language families, along with Indo-European and Austronesian. The name of Hungary could be a corruption of Ungrian/Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to them as Ogry/Ogrove (sg. Ogrinu) seemed to confirm that[1]. As to the source of this ethnonym in the Slavic languages, current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onogur (which means "ten arrows" or "ten tribes") [2][3][4].
There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /a?/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, and Hungarian /h/ corresponds to Khanty /x/, while Hungarian final /z/ corresponds to Khanty final /t/. For example, Hungarian ház ([ha?z]) "house" vs. Khanty xot ([xot]) "house", and Hungarian száz ([sa?z]) "hundred" vs. Khanty sot ([sot]) "hundred".
