Hungary stops being understood at every border

Hungary lies in the middle of the Carpathian basin, and its language has no relative on any border. Budapest stands on the Danube, on both banks. Other language families begin all around. Hungarian belongs to none of them.

9,514,251 people live on 93,028 square kilometres. There is no coast. The neighbours are Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. Hungarian is the official language, the forint the currency. Hungary belongs to the European Union. The Carpathians run through Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania. The state itself is the floor of the basin that those arcs stand around.

The floor of the basin

The Danube crosses the country and divides Budapest. Buda lies on the right bank, Pest on the left, looking downstream. The city is the place where the basin has a capital, not a port and not a pass. West of the Danube lies Transdanubia, with Lake Balaton as the great lake of that half. To the east the Great Plain opens. The Tisza comes out of Ukraine, crosses that plain and leaves the country to the south.

Every border is a land border. Austria to the west, Slovenia and Croatia to the southwest, Serbia to the south, Romania to the east, Ukraine to the northeast, Slovakia to the north. The mountains that frame the basin on the map lie largely in those states. Hungary is the area in between, open toward the neighbours, without a coast of its own on which it could end. The state is a middle. The edges belong to the others.

A language with no sister on the border

Hungarian is a Uralic language. Its closest relatives, Khanty and Mansi, are spoken in western Siberia. Finnish and Estonian belong to the wider family and share no border with Hungary. On Hungary's own border one hears German in Austria, Slavic languages in Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and Romanian in Romania. None of them continues Hungarian. The family stops as soon as the boundary stone appears.

The constitution makes Hungarian the official language. The law thereby describes the state, not the whole language map of the region. In Budapest the official language is also the language of the street. Across the border, the neighbours' offices work in another family. For a central European state that is the real border, clearer than the course of the Danube.

The border does not only end the state. It begins another language family.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Borders of 1920, the forint inside the Union

The Treaty of Trianon drew the borders of today's Hungary in 1920. The Kingdom of Hungary was larger. Hungarian has since been spoken in the neighbouring states as well, in areas that belonged to the kingdom before the treaty. That is a fact of the language map. It is not a territorial claim and not a programme. The line of 1920 is the state. The language runs beyond it in some valleys and towns.

The forint of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank is the currency of this state inside the European Union. Budapest governs the basin from the two banks of the Danube. The Union ties Hungary to neighbours whose languages remain foreign to it. The forint keeps the money apart from the euro of most of those partners. Politically the country is in the middle of things. Linguistically it remains an island in the basin it fills.

Hungary is the floor of the Carpathian basin and a language that changes family at every border. Trianon cut the state in 1920. Hungarian is spoken beyond that line as well, and the forint remains the money of the Union to which this basin belongs.