Worth to watch! Hungarian language through the eyes of a foreigner – video

Paul Jorgensen has been publishing videos on his Langfocus Youtube Channel since 2015. He describes himself as a language enthusiast, avid traveller, and obsessive creator. He must do something well because now he already has almost 600 thousand followers. His latest video is about the Hungarian language.

A short history

To start with, he clarifies that Hungarian is very special because it is surrounded by Indo-European languages though it is not one of them. Hungarian speakers mainly live in the Carpathian-basin, not only in Hungary but also beyond its borders, for example, in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia or Ukraine. The

biggest minority is in Transylvania with around 1.2 million people consisting 6.3 pc of Romania’s population. 

The Hungarian language is a member of the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family’s Finno-Uralic. This former branch split into the Proto-Ugric and Proto-Finnic groups. Finnish and Estonian derived from the latter while Hungarian from the former around 800 BC. However, during their wandering to the Carpathian Basin, Hungarians had extensive contact with Turkic peoples. For example, they formed an alliance with Onogur tribes living North from the Black Sea and

this is how they got the name, Hungarian.

It is hard to tell the exact number of loan words from Turkic, but a lexicon contains 500 of them. Furthermore,

even the Old Hungarian script derived from the Old Turkic runic script.

This was used by the Szeklers until the 17th century.

During the times the language absorbed words from a variety of languages like German, Iranic and Slavic languages as well as Latin and the Turkic languages. Modern Hungarian language was developed at the beginning of the 19th century. The reform’s aim was to standardize the language and make it more suitable for literature and the sciences. As a result, Hungarian became the