Hungarian or the Hungarian language is the national or official language of Hungary. It is one of the twenty four official languages in the European Union.

Hungarian is spoken by Hungarian people in the country and around the world. The language is also spoken in neighbouring Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine.

While most languages spoken in Europe have their roots in the Indo-European family, Hungarian is from the Uralic language family, which is also the origin of Estonian and Finnish. Hungarian is also an agglutinative language. It is a morphological classification of languages that segregates various languages on the basis of how words are formed and grammar is constructed.

There are many interesting facts about the Hungarian language that are not always talked about. Here are some that might amaze anyone.

• The Hungarian language proves that a Hungarian had visited America before Christopher Columbus did. There is a runic stone in Yarmouth County Museum in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland that has Old Hungarian inscriptions. While there were Hungarians accompanying the Vikings and Columbus, the language used on the stone was from a much earlier era, which proves that one or more Hungarian explorers had been to the new world before Columbus.
• One of the few valuable incunabula in British Museum Library in London is Hungarian.
• Hungarian is the only language that has preserved most of its ancient elements. Most old languages have evolved over time and ancient grammar, words, dialects, colloquialism, the elements of literacy and various other essences of the language are usually lost. English contains less than 4% of etymons, Latin has about 5% and so does Hebrew which is surprising, even Tibetan Sanskrit has only 12% and Indian languages have 9%. Hungarian language has a staggering 68% of its etymons.
• According to claims made by many Hungarian linguists and scientists, the language is the oldest among all Euro-Asiatic languages.
• While Hungary is not a vast country and apparently did not have much influence in the world through the centuries, it is surprising to note that many places, cities and landmarks around the globe have been named in Hungarian. This just reiterates that there may have been much influence of Hungarians and the language than what is known. There are hills, rivers and even towns in Iraq, India, Tunisia, Philippines and across the Caucasus region among others that have been named in Hungarian.