The national language here is Hungarian, which people here call Magyar. In my lab we mostly speak English, though sometimes there’s a mix of Hungarian words thrown in. I am trying to learn to speak, considering that I will be here for at least 4 years, but it is a tough language to learn as an English speaker.
What makes Hungarian really fascinating is how ancient and unique it is. It doesn’t come from the same family of languages as most of Europe. Most European languages—like Italian, English, German, and Spanish—come from what’s called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. PIE was the ancient “mother language” spoken thousands of years ago on the Eurasian steppe, and from it evolved the big branches we know today, like Latin (which led to the Romance languages) and Proto-Germanic (which led to English and German).
Hungarian, though, comes from a completely different family called Uralic, which likely formed in areas near the Ural Mountains. That means that Hungarian existed long before Proto-Indo-European spread across most of Europe and isn’t related to the languages of Hungary’s neighbors at all. It’s more closely related to Finnish and Estonian, though still quite different!
Unlike Italy, where every region has its own dialect (and sometimes people can’t even understand each other across regions), Hungarian is remarkably consistent.
