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I was told by somebody who has lived near Hungary that she thought that Hungarian and Turkish were related, and that their languages are very similar. A brief google search seems to support this.

However, that article does say that this grouping is "criticized by some contemporary linguists" and the article doesn't seem to be linked from the main Turkish language page (it is on the Hungarian one though). The main consensus seems to be that Hungarian is more related to Finnish than Turkish as well.

Today, are these considered related languages in terms of origin? And which is Hungarian really closer to, Finnish or Turkish? (Hungary seems ethnically closer to Turkey but it's not quite geographically close to either)

  • The proposed "Finno-Ugric" grouping does not include Turkish at all, so I don't see how it is relevant to your question. – brass tacks Dec 16 '18 at 11:21
  • @Riker you are right, I should have just added it as a comment. There is a Wikipedia article about the Turkish words in the Hungarian language, but it's available in Hungarian language only ( https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%B6r%C3%B6k_j%C3%B6vev%C3%A9nyszavak_a_magyar_nyelvben ). – Botond Dec 16 '18 at 13:17
  • @Botond thanks, that's a pretty interesting read (fed through google translate). –  Dec 16 '18 at 17:15
  • @sumelic I've removed it in favor of a better tag anyway, I had run across the term while researching this question and figured it couldn't hurt to tag it (the same way I did tag [tag:uralic]) –  Dec 16 '18 at 17:16
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    Much of Hungary was ruled by the Ottomans for over a century, and there are a fair number of loanwords dating from this time. – Matt Dec 16 '18 at 17:28
  • @Matt : and they had contact with each other even earlier, while they were still nomadic, in the time of the Khazars. – vsz Dec 17 '18 at 07:14
  • I have been in Hungary. I speak Turkish natively. There are a lot of common words but probably because of Ottoman influence. – ferit Dec 17 '18 at 09:49
  • @Matt A contact for a century is not long on the linguistic time scale – Sir Cornflakes Dec 18 '18 at 11:23
  • @jknappen No, and I don't suggest that any linguistic similarities would arise from this time period beyond the many documented loanwords. – Matt Dec 18 '18 at 11:55
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    @Matt In fact, I had expected more and more interesting loanwords. Almost all loans seem to refer to Islam, Tukish bureaucracy, and some food items. Nothing touching the core vocabulary. – Sir Cornflakes Dec 18 '18 at 12:49

4 Answers4

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Turkish and Hungarian are typologically similar: They are both agglutinating languages with vowel harmony and rather rich vowel inventories.

They are, to our best knowledge, not genetically related. Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family including Finnish, Estonian, Sami, and about a dozen languages spoken in Russia. Turkish belongs to the Turkic language family. Many linguists in the past and in the present have speculated about larger language families comprising both Uralic and Turkic, but no demonstrable regular correspondences have been found so far.

Sir Cornflakes
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    It worth mentioning that "Hungarian is a Turkic language" is still a popular theory in Hungary. It is, of course, completely unfounded and is espoused for ideological reasons, but the situation can be confusing for laypeople. – user54748 Dec 15 '18 at 21:01
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    @user54748 What ideological reasons do people espouse it for, anyway? I find it kind of surprising that Hungarians would generally want to associate themselves more closely with Turkish peoples (I mean, feel a close cultural and/or historical connection)...? – Owen_AR Dec 15 '18 at 23:04
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    @Owen_R because of pan-Turanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turanism – ubadub Dec 16 '18 at 03:31
  • I've decided to accept this answer since it seems to be the most accurate and up-to-date one. –  Dec 19 '18 at 00:01
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    When it comes to central europe, Huns arrived to the region sooner than Ugric tribes. There was long historical dispute with legitimacy of hungarian political regime. Many neigbouring societies, notably germanic, slavic and latin considered them to be invaders into the region. In order to resist this pressure, hungarian political leaders claimed, hungarians are descendants of turkish tribe called Huns, which invaded the few centuries ago. This claim improved legimitimacy. However, as stated in the answer Hungarian language and Turkic language are from very different language families. – Fusion Dec 12 '20 at 10:57
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Hungarian belongs to the Ugric subgroup of the Uralic language family, while Turkish belongs to the controversial Altaic language family. Nevertheless, Hungarian has had some kind of contact with Turkic languages, hence the influence in its vocabulary. However language relationship cannot be based on loanwords and contact based influence, but systematic correspondences in phonology (regular sound laws) and grammar. So, Hungarian is undoubtedly closer to Finnish as a member of the same language family, but not closer than what Spanish is to Welsh (both Indo-European languages in different subgroups). Hungarian is closer to other Ugric languages which like Finnish and Estonian belong to the Uralic language family.

Midas
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  • @Riker Do you refer to Hungarian and Finnish specifically? – Midas Dec 15 '18 at 22:12
  • @Riker: To get a simple idea you can look at this: http://www.helsinki.fi/~jolaakso/f-h-ety.html

    I will have a look for something on grammar that is not too complicated.

     – Midas Dec 15 '18 at 22:31
  • @Riker: It is hard to get simple when it comes to grammar comparisons. Anyway, here is another paper analyzing grammatical aspects of Finno-Ugric. On page 44 you will also find a tree of the Uralic family. This is going to give you an idea on the linguistic distance between these languages. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/81543/WPL_27_May_1983_089.pdf – Midas Dec 15 '18 at 22:53
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    Re: "Hungarian is [...] not closer [to Finnish] than what Spanish is to Russian": That seems like a rather bold claim. I'm not even sure quite how one would assess it. Do you have a reference? – ruakh Dec 16 '18 at 06:59
  • @ruakh My point is that those languages belong to the same family but different subgroups. Apparently Spanish and Russian are more distant within IE, but Finnish and Hungarian are not that close either. Maybe Italo-Celtic would be a better comparison in this case. – Midas Dec 16 '18 at 07:57
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    Looking at some dates for the protolanguages, the split between Finnish and Hungarian is significantly younger (ca. 2000 BCE) than the one between Spanish and Russian (ca. 3500 BCE) – Sir Cornflakes Dec 16 '18 at 21:44
  • @Midas the above comment may be worth editing into your answer? –  Dec 19 '18 at 00:01
  • @Midas (a bit of a late response) That paper uses the Finno-Ugric classification, which seems to be somewhat outdated? A (cursory) google search revealed that it is somewhat criticized. –  Dec 19 '18 at 00:08
  • @Riker, I edited it and put some more relevant (Italo-Celtic). The point however is not to hit the exact proposed dates, but to demonstrate that although two languages can belong to the same language family, they can still diverge significantly within it. – Midas Dec 20 '18 at 20:51
  • @Riker How is it outdated? Because a minority questions it as of today? I am not saying they are wrong, but at the same time I see the term being used in recent publications of major publishers (Brill, De Gruyter). Even in Britannica there is not a word about it being outdated or criticized. In that sense it is not outdated, but there is criticism. It is also by no means controversial like other existing groupings. – Midas Dec 20 '18 at 20:55
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Hungarian and Turkish are not proven yet to be related, and likely aren't. Hungarian is Finno-Ugric like Finnish, Estonian, Khanty, Mansi, Udmurt, Komi, Sami etc., though with very distinctive features as those languages evolved separately for centuries, even millenia. On the other hand, Turkish is Turkic like Kazakh, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Uyghur etc. They do have in common agglutination, which is very prevalent and works somewhat similarly in both languages, as well as vowel harmony, and Hungarian has borrowed a lot of Turkic words between the Ottoman rule and contacts between the early tribes of the Magyars, but this isn't sufficient to establish a common origin between these two languages.

The reason many Hungarians seem to believe Hungarian and Turkish are related is that this narrative is pushed by the Hungarian government, and Viktor Orbán in particular, who really wants to tighten up his relations with Turkey. Hungary also joined the Turkic Council as an observer state.

mi1000
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Hungarian belongs to Uralic language family. Turkish belongs to Altaic language family. Both language groups belong to super Uralic-Altaic language family. Uralic-Altaic languages have many commonalities;

  • Suffix oriented
  • Vowel harmony
  • No genders like he, she or it
  • No plural form after numbers, like five cow
  • Special words for people older than you

Both languages are Asiatic, they have originated from close locations. There are cultural similarities as both are from almost same steppes.

ilhan
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    That language family (uralic-altaic) is not used anymore, since it has too many flaws. Do you have a better source? –  Dec 17 '18 at 00:28
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    Also, do you have a source for the "originated from close locations" part? –  Dec 17 '18 at 00:29
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    Agglutination (suffixes) is by no means indicator of relationship. Georgian is agglutinative but has no relation to Turkish nor Hungarian. There are numerous agglutinative languages that have no relation at all. Also Altaic with exception to Turkic and Mongolian is a controversial group, which makes Ural-Altaic even more controversial. I would put a note on that if I were you, to avoid downvoting. Those are my five cents. – Midas Dec 17 '18 at 05:41
  • @Riker it is taught in Turkish schools. Also as a source https://acikders.ankara.edu.tr/mod/page/view.php?id=18677&lang=en http://turkoloji.cu.edu.tr/CAGDAS%20TURK%20LEHCELERI/temir.pdf – ilhan Dec 17 '18 at 10:30
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    @ilhan Sigh. Schools should not teach unsound theories long falsified by scientific standards. – Sir Cornflakes Dec 18 '18 at 13:13
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    @jknappen I don't know what you mean "unsound theories" because I've never seen them. Here I've provided 2 university sources. Additionally I can say that there is no mention that Ural-Altay family has only one root, they could have 2 or 3 or 4. However because of grammatical similarities they are considered one super group. I believe the denial of Ural-Altay family is due to word based mindset in Indo-European languages. Indo-European speakers cannot gasp the importance of suffixes, vowel harmony, no-genders, no-plurals, and dozen more. They think that these are trivial components. – ilhan Dec 18 '18 at 18:59
  • @Riker, these languages have originated in northern half of Asia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Linguistic_map_of_the_Altaic%2C_Turkic_and_Uralic_languages_%28en%29.png – ilhan Dec 18 '18 at 19:04
  • @ilhan that is a huge area (asia is very large). Also, wikipedia isn't a particularly reliable source. In addition, the ural-altaic has been widely debunked, with good reasons for it. Can you supply any sources for your claim "Indo-European speakers cannot gasp the importance of suffixes, vowel harmony, no-genders, no-plurals, and dozen more."? –  Dec 18 '18 at 23:24
  • @Riker do you mean the map from Wikipedia is wrong? – ilhan Dec 18 '18 at 23:39
  • @Riker Do you mean that these Northern part of Asia developed different languages with same grammatical structures coincidentally? Also I wonder whether you are fluent in any Uralic or Altaic language? – ilhan Dec 18 '18 at 23:49
  • @ilhan I am not fluent but I have some experience with Hungarian, which prompted my question. Also, I don't mean that it's wrong, but it may be out of date. I would prefer a slightly more reliable source. –  Dec 18 '18 at 23:50
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    And I'm not directly disagreeing with what you say, but I'm requesting sources other than personal experience (i.e. peer reviewed papers or similar). Though to be fair, Finland is right next to Sweden yet Sweden is not Uralic. Geography isn't everything. –  Dec 18 '18 at 23:51
  • @ilhan By the way, I don't mean to be contrary or debate everything you say. Honestly I like this answer more than jknappens, since it makes more sense, but it needs some better sources. –  Dec 18 '18 at 23:59
  • If you fix the sources I'd be happy to accept it. –  Dec 18 '18 at 23:59
  • @Riker as I said before; the connection between Uralic and Altaic is not word based but grammatical based. So it depends on what you mean by one family, for your definition it is not one family, for my definition it is one family https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ural-Altaic-languages . I don't think that there are peer reviewed English sources on the topic but you may find more information on Hungarian and Turkish sources. Just like Voynich manuscript was partially decoded by a Turk but not European speakers it is a native speaker topic. – ilhan Dec 19 '18 at 00:17
  • @ilhan that article hasn't been edited in 7 years according to the history, so it's a bit out of date I think. –  Dec 19 '18 at 00:21
  • Probably both families had some fusion(s) in the past. Here is a genetic connection in figure 4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1712423/ and here is geographic, some linguistic and cultural connection between pages 14-16 https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/37178928/kobarid-final-version.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1545180847&Signature=TsEm7hr4lA3CY3SLRhbRiJFemFE%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_Slavic_Ethnogenesis_in_the_framework.pdf – ilhan Dec 19 '18 at 00:22
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    I'm not debating the relationships of those families specifically, I'm debating the classification of the Altaic family in general. Even a cursory google search gives an immediate result. –  Dec 19 '18 at 00:23
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    @Riker And that Altaic family does not comprise Uralic. – Sir Cornflakes Dec 21 '18 at 10:58