As a member of the Uralic language family, Hungarian stands apart from the majority of European languages, which belong to the Indo-European family. It is the official language of Hungary but is also natively spoken in parts of Slovakia and Romania. According to the eLinguistics.net analysis using specific software modules to assess linguistic relationships, the five languages most similar to Hungarian are Estonian, Finnish, Tajik, Persian, and Tatar.
- Estonian (50.5)
Estonian is perhaps the closest relative to Hungarian, as both languages belong to the Finno-Ugric branch. It is spoken primarily in Estonia. Both languages use agglutination, meaning they add suffixes to base words to indicate grammatical relationships and functions. There are some shared vocabulary roots due to their common ancestry. - Finnish (50.3)
Another member of the Finno-Ugric branch is Finnish, one of the official languages of Finland. Both languages utilize vowel harmony, where vowels within a word agree in terms of frontness or backness. However, Finnish has been influenced by Scandinavian languages, while Hungarian is influenced more by Slavic and Turkic languages. - Tajik (28.0)
Tajik, a variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan, is part of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. While it is quite different from Hungarian, some similarities exist. There may have been historical contact between speakers of Hungarian and various Central Asian peoples, leading to some shared loanwords. - Persian (24.8)
The official language of Iran, Persian, is very similar to Tajik. Over several centuries, Persian and Hungarian may have exchanged through their historical interactions with both the Ottoman and Roman Empire. However, these languages are still extremely different from each other. - Tatar (24.4)
Tatar is a Turkic language primarily spoken in Russia. There are a number of shared loanwords between Hungarian and Tatar. The ancestors of the Hungarians, migrated westward from the Ural Mountains region through the Eurasian steppes. During this migration, they came into contact with various Turkic tribes.
(to be considered for the list, the language must be spoken by at least one million people)