Hungarian’s linguistic DNA: How phonetics and grammar prove Hungarian’s Finno-Ugric kinship

Researchers are looking for regular phonetic correspondences between Hungarian and other Finno-Ugric languages, which can be used to reconstruct ancient language forms. Such correspondences can be observed at all levels of the language, whether in the formation of the phoneme set, verb and pronoun phrasing, or sentence structures.

According to Egyetem TV’s Választár series, the Finno-Ugric affinity of the Hungarian language is mainly proven by the methods of historical-comparative linguistics. This method has been used worldwide since the 19th century to investigate relationships between languages. The kinship of languages of the same origin is based not only on vocabulary similarities but also on systematic similarities in phonology, grammatical structures, and syntactic features.

Phonological, alphabetic and syntactic similarities

Phonological correspondences, for example, show that certain sound changes have occurred consistently in related languages. This is the case with the relationship between Hungarian “kő” (stone) and Finnish “kivi”, which may seem surprising at first sight but can be deduced from linguistic history.

There are also common features in grammatical structures. For example, the Hungarian agglutinative system of suffixation is similar to that of other Finno-Ugric languages. The use of cases, verb formation, and possessive person marking show clear affinities between the Finno-Ugric languages.

In the field of syntactic structures, the similarity is less striking, as the order of sentence parts varies in a relatively limited way across the world’s languages. Nevertheless, there are structural elements that link Hungarian with the Finno-Ugric family of languages.

The most important Hungarian words of Finno-Ugric origin

There are a number of words in the Hungarian language that can be proven to be of Finno-Ugric origin. These include words that denote basic concepts, such as names of body parts (hand, head), terms related to nature (water, tree), and names of basic actions (eat, drink).

There are words of Finno-Ugric origin that, at first glance, do not seem to have a cognate meaning in other Finno-Ugric languages. For example, the relationship between Hungarian “kő” (stone) and Finnish “kivi” is more difficult to recognise because of phonetic changes.