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Language Lineage

Ugric

Proto-Uralic *k became a fricative before back vowels: *kala 'fish' is Hungarian hal and Mansi and Khanty xul, against Finnish kala.

c. 2nd – 1st millennium BCEThe forest-steppe on the eastern side of the southern Urals and in western Siberia
On this page
  1. Origins
  2. A Contested Node
  3. Where its languages are spoken
  4. Turning points
  5. Contested classifications

01

Origins

Ugric groups Hungarian with its closest relatives, Khanty and Mansi, which are spoken today along the Ob river in western Siberia, thousands of kilometres from Hungary. Their shared ancestor probably lived on the forest-steppe border east of the southern Urals, where forest hunting met the horse cultures of the steppe.

The clearest shared change is in the consonants: Proto-Uralic *k before a back vowel became a fricative, so *kala 'fish' is Hungarian hal and Mansi and Khanty xul. The three languages also share a word for 'horse' (Hungarian ló, Mansi lū, Khanty law) and other horse-riding vocabulary, which fits a people in contact with the steppe.

02

A Contested Node

Ugric is one of the more widely accepted intermediate groupings in Uralic, but it is not beyond dispute. The shared innovations are fewer than for Finnic or Saami, and some might reflect contact on the forest-steppe rather than a single ancestor. Hungarian also spent over a thousand years apart, on the steppe and then in the Carpathian Basin, and changed so much that comparing it with Khanty and Mansi is hard.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. HungaryHungarian c. 9.5 million
  2. RomaniaHungarian c. 1 million
  3. SlovakiaHungarian c. 450,000
  4. SerbiaHungarian c. 200,000
  5. UkraineHungarian c. 150,000
  6. RussiaOb-Ugric c. 10,000

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Sound lawc. 2nd – 1st millennium BCE

    *k becomes a fricative

    *k → *x / _ back vowel (*kala → hal, xul)

    Before back vowels, *k becomes *x: *kala 'fish' → Mansi and Khanty xul, Hungarian hal (where x later weakened to h). It is the best-known sound change shared by the Ugric languages.

    Compare with other consonant shifts across families →

    Sources (1)
    • Abondolo, Daniel, ed. 1998. The Uralic Languages. London: Routledge.
  2. Contactc. 2nd – 1st millennium BCEContested

    Horses and the steppe

    Shared words for the horse, saddle and riding point to Ugric speakers adopting horse culture from steppe neighbours, some of them Iranian-speaking. Which words are inherited and which were borrowed is debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Bakró-Nagy, Marianne, Johanna Laakso & Elena Skribnik, eds. 2022. The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Splitc. 1000–500 BCEContested

    Hungarian and Ob-Ugric part

    The ancestors of the Hungarians move south onto the steppe, and those of the Khanty and Mansi move north and east into the Ob basin. The date is estimated from loanwords and archaeology and is uncertain.

    Sources (1)
    • Abondolo, Daniel, ed. 1998. The Uralic Languages. London: Routledge.

Outside the tree

Contested classifications

These disagreements may never be settled. Each position is given with its grounds, and no side is declared correct.

  • Widely accepted

    Ugric

    Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi share an ancestor that the other Uralic branches do not

    Evidence for

    The three share the fricative development of *k before back vowels, a set of vocabulary including horse terms, and some grammatical features. Most handbooks treat Ugric as a genuine branch.

    Evidence against

    The shared innovations are relatively few, and some could have spread by contact among neighbours on the forest-steppe. Even whether Khanty and Mansi form an 'Ob-Ugric' subgroup together is questioned. Critics such as Salminen treat Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi as potentially separate branches of Uralic.

    Sources (2)
    • Salminen, Tapani. 2002. Problems in the taxonomy of the Uralic languages in the light of modern comparative studies. In Lingvističeskij bespredel. Moscow: Moscow State University Press.
    • Abondolo, Daniel, ed. 1998. The Uralic Languages. London: Routledge.