Hungarian
Hungarian, or Magyar as it is called in Hungarian, is spoken by 10.5 million people in Hungary, and by substantial numbers of speakers in adjacent countries, especially Romania. It is a member of the Ugric subfamily of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family of languages. As such, it is a linguistic island, a European Uralic language surrounded by Indo-European languages. The original Hungarians moved westward into Europe from their homeland east of the Ural Mountains reaching their present settlement area in the Danube basin west of the Carpathian Mountains in the ninth century. Hungarian has borrowed prodigiously from other languages. There is an early loan set from Iranian and Turkic languages that were borrowed during the Hungarian migration. There are also numerous loans from German, Italian, French, and English that entered the language after the arrival of Hungarians in Europe. Because of the development of a vigorous standardized language, dialectal variation in Hungary has been minimized. Variation does exist, mainly between rural and urban standard varieties. Hungarian uses a Latin-based orthography with diacritics for marking special characteristics in Hungarian.
UCLA Language Materials Project
Information on writing system:
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UCSD International Center
Mingei museum of folk art
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Balboa Park House
of Pacific Relations
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Landmark
Theaters: foreign films
San Diego House of Hungary
The Folk Dancer