Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to the Ugric branch along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia (Khanty–Mansia region of North Asia),[4] but it is no longer clear that it is a valid group.

The traditional view holds that the Hungarian language diverged from its Ugric relatives in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, in western Siberia east of the southern Urals.

Archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.

[citation needed] After the arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, the language came into contact with a variety of speech communities, among them Slavic, Turkic, and German.

[23][24] In the 21st century, studies support an origin of the Uralic languages, including early Hungarian, in eastern or central Siberia, somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei rivers or near the Sayan mountains in the Russian–Mongolian border region.

[25] A 2019 study based on genetics, archaeology and linguistics, found that early Uralic speakers arrived in Europe from the east, specifically from eastern Siberia.

Following an academic debate known as Az ugor-török háború ("the Ugric-Turkic war"), the Finno-Ugric hypothesis was concluded the sounder of the two, mainly based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz.

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.

[33][34] The standard language lost its diphthongs, and several postpositions transformed into suffixes, including reá "onto" (the phrase utu rea "onto the way" found in the 1055 text would later become útra).

[35][note 1] In 1533, Kraków printer Benedek Komjáti published Letters of St. Paul in Hungarian [hu] (modern orthography: A Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven), the first Hungarian-language book set in movable type.

Today, the language holds official status nationally in Hungary and regionally in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Austria and Slovenia.

The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania.

However, Hungarian is a topic-prominent language, and so has a word order that depends not only on syntax but also on the topic–comment structure of the sentence (for example, what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized).

), from the movie The Empire Strikes Back, the pronoun I (én) is in the focus and implies that it is new information, and the listener thought that someone else is his father.

Some anomalies emerged with the arrival of multinational companies who have addressed their customers in the te (least polite) form right from the beginning of their presence in Hungary.

A typical example is the Swedish furniture shop IKEA, whose web site and other publications address the customers in te form.

[63] Except for a few Latin and Greek loanwords, these differences are unnoticed even by native speakers; the words have been entirely adopted into the Hungarian lexicon.

There is no definite set number of words within a language that can be tallied up,[64] and other factors like the frequency of use and dialectal differences also affect the end result.

Due to centuries of cohabitation with Turkic peoples such as the Volga Bulgars and Khazars, the exact origin of certain words can be hard to pin down.

[66] These words include tehén (cow), tej (milk), asszony (married woman, wife), vám (tax), vár (fortress), vásár (market), üveg (glass) etc.

[75] Other, mostly more technical, religious, or scholarly loanwords also numbering in the dozens are from Latin and Greek, while newer layers may include virtually any European language that Hungarian has been in contact with over the centuries.

Some examples: Hungarian words for the points of the compass are directly derived from the position of the Sun during the day in the Northern Hemisphere.

There are two basic words for "red" in Hungarian: "piros" and "vörös" (variant: "veres"; compare with Estonian "verev" or Finnish "punainen").

In addition, there are separate prefixes for several ancestors and descendants: grandparent (OR ük-ük-ük(nagy)szülő) The words for "boy" and "girl" are applied with possessive suffixes.

They are not compound words but are formed by adding a series of one- and two-syllable suffixes (and a few prefixes) to a simple root ("szent", saint or holy).

Almost all trigraphs found in Hungarian text are the result of doubled digraphs, but there are a few exceptions: tizennyolc ("eighteen") is a concatenation of tizen + nyolc.

Hungarian has minimal pairs of single vs. double consonants, for example tol ("push") vs. toll ("feather" or "pen").

While to English speakers they may seem unusual at first, once the new orthography and pronunciation are learned, written Hungarian is almost completely phonemic (except for etymological spellings and "ly, j" representing /j/).

As in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, the Hungarian convention for date and time is to go from the general to the specific, starting with the year first, then month, then day.

[78] Although address formatting is increasingly being influenced by standard European conventions, the traditional Hungarian style is: 1052 Budapest, Deák Ferenc tér 1.