Hungarian is an Ugric language with about 15 million speakers in Hungary (Magyarország), Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Slovakia. There are also many people of Hungarian origin in the UK and other European countries, the USA, Canada and Australia.

Hungarian is a highly inflected language in which nouns can have up to 238 possible forms. It is related to Mansi, an Ob-Ugric language with about 4,000 speakers who live in the eastern Urals, and Khanty or Ostyak, the other Ob-Ugric language that is spoken by about 15,000 people in the Ob valley of western Siberia.

The earliest written text in Hungarian was a funeral oration (halotti beszéd) written in 1196, and the first complete book to be printed in Hungarian, Az zenth Paal leueley magyar nyeluen (The letters of Saint Paul in the Hungarian language) by Benedek Komjáti, was published in 1533 in Kraków in Poland. Hungarian literature flourished during the 18th and 19th centuries.