ABSTRACT
Hungarian belongs to the large Finno-Ugric branch of Uralic, and is the official language of the Republic of Hungary. There is also a large Hungarian-speaking minority in Transylvania (Erdély) and the total number of speakers is about 15 million. The ethnonym is Magyar: a magyar nyelv ‘the Hungarian language’. Hungarian is one of the few non-Indo-European national languages of Europe. Although Finnish and its close relative Estonian are also members of the Finno-Ugric family, their relationship to Hungarian is distant.
