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This is where the Hungarian language comes from: Harvard solved the mystery
The latest DNA research has upended what we thought we knew about the origins of Hungarian and other Uralic languages. Genetic evidence now points far to the east — deep into Siberia — suggesting these languages began their westward migration more than four thousand years ago.
An eastern fingerprint hidden in the Hungarian language
Researchers have long known that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking peoples carry a distinct East Eurasian genetic signature. For decades, this was tied to the Ural Mountains region — a logical, if somewhat vague, explanation. But Harvard researchers went further, collecting genetic samples from Siberian communities that had never before been studied.
What they found was striking: the Yakuts, an indigenous people of northeastern Siberia, share a genetic pattern closely linked to Finns, Estonians — and the ancient Hungarians who settled the Carpathian Basin over a thousand years ago. No other language family carries this same signature. According to the Harvard Gazette, the connection is not coincidental. It is a thread running through history.
Not the steppe — the taiga
The spread of Uralic languages did not happen across the open, easily travelled grasslands of the Eurasian steppe. Instead, researchers believe it unfolded through the vast northern taiga.
The genetic data also reveals that this Siberian ancestry has survived to varying degrees. Estonians carry roughly 2%, Finns around 10%. In the Nganasans — one of the northernmost peoples of Russia — it is almost total.
In modern Hungarians, the signal has nearly vanished, diluted by centuries of mixing with other European populations. But in the DNA of medieval Hungarian conquerors, it is unmistakably present, proof that the communities who brought the Hungarian language westward still carried this ancient eastern heritage with them.
Closer to Alaska than to Finland
This shifts the picture dramatically. The earliest homeland of the Uralic language family may have been far further east than previously assumed — somewhere in the remote northern reaches of Siberia.
Which means the ancestral Hungarians’ origins may stretch even beyond the Ural region that history books have long pointed to. The communities that carried proto-Hungarian westward were likely related to ancient northern peoples who lived across the taiga belt, maintaining contact with one another across enormous distances for centuries.
A language family that crossed an ocean
The research also sheds new light on the Yeniseian language family, which once spread across central Siberia and today survives only in the critically endangered Ket language. Place names in Mongolia and surrounding regions suggest these languages once covered a far larger territory.
More remarkably, the genetic findings lend fresh support to linguist Edward Vajda’s theory that Yeniseian languages are related to the Na-Dene languages of North America. If true, a single ancient language family effectively bridged two continents — carried by people moving through the far north at a time when the world was more connected than we ever realised.
What ancient DNA is teaching us
This research does more than confirm the eastern origins of Hungarian and Finnish. The spread of languages and cultures was a complex, multi-layered process driven not by great empires or massive migrations, but by small, adaptable, highly mobile communities who shaped Eurasia’s linguistic map across thousands of years. The Hungarian language is not an isolated curiosity of European history. It is one thread in a vast, continent-spanning story — and ancient DNA is finally letting us read it.
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