Hungarians
ethnic group native to Central Europe
Hungarians, also known as Magyars, are an ethnic group native to present day Hungary (Magyarország), and the Carpathian Basin who share a common culture, language, history and ancestry. They have a notable presence in parts of the former Kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarian language belongs to the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, alongside the Khanty and Mansi languages.
There are an estimated 14.5 million ethnic Hungarians and their descendants worldwide, of whom approximately 9.6 million live in today's Hungary. About 2 million Hungarians live in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 and are now parts of Hungary's seven neighbouring countries, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. In addition, significant groups of people with Hungarian ancestry live in various other parts of the world, most of them in the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Chile, Brazil, Australia, and Argentina, and therefore constitute the Hungarian diaspora (Hungarian: szórványmagyarság).
The diaspora can be divided into several subgroups according to local linguistic and cultural characteristics; subgroups include the Székelys (in eastern Transylvania as well as a few in Suceava County, Bukovina), the Csángós (in Western Moldavia), the Palóc, the Matyó and the Magyarabs (in Nubia).
Name
The Hungarians' own ethnonym to denote themselves in the Early Middle Ages is uncertain. The exonym "Hungarian" is believed to have derived from the Huns and the Oghur-Turkic Onoğur (literally "Ten Arrows" or "Ten Tribes").
Prior to the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin when the Hungarian conquerors lived east of the Carpathian Mountains, on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, written sources called the Hungarians: "Ungri" by Georgius Monachus in 837, "Ungri" by Annales Bertiniani in 862, and "Ungari" by the Annales ex Annalibus Iuvavensibus in 881.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q133032. The Library of Congress control number is sh85063016. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hungarians” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.