History of the Hungarian language

Hungarian is an Ugric language. It has been spoken in the region of modern-day Hungary since the Magyar invasion of Pannonia in the late 9th century.

The predecessor language of Hungarian separated from the Ob-Ugric languages, probably still during the Bronze Age. There is no attestation for a period of close to two millennia. Old Hungarian is attested fragmentarily in epigraphy in the Old Hungarian script beginning in the 10th century, and isolated Hungarian words are attested in manuscript tradition from the turn of the 11th century.The oldest surviving coherent text in Old Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, dated to 1192.

The Old Hungarian period is by convention taken to cover Medieval Hungary, from the invasion of Pannonia in AD 896, to the collapse of the Kingdom of Hungary following the Battle of Mohács of 1526.A Middle Hungarian phase is by convention taken to last from 1526 to 1772, i.e. from the first books printed in Hungarian to the Age of Enlightenment, which promted language reforms that resulted in the modern literary Hungarian language.

Prehistory

Separation from Common Uralic

The history of the Hungarian language begins with the Uralic era, in the Neolithic age, when the linguistic ancestors of all Uralic languages were living together, in the area of the Ural Mountains.



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