Hungarian is the sole official language of Hungary and belongs to the Uralic language family.
Hungarian is most closely related to Khanty and Mansi, languages spoken east of the Ural Mountains, although the relationship is not obvious from everyday vocabulary. Finnish and Estonian are also Uralic languages, but they belong to a different branch and are not especially close conversationally to Hungarian.
The language reached the Carpathian Basin with the Hungarian conquest traditionally dated to 895–896. Today, Hungarian is spoken mainly in Hungary and by historic communities in neighboring countries including Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine.
Hungarian is known for extensive use of suffixes, vowel harmony, and a word order that can change to emphasize information. Its many grammatical cases are often discussed by learners, though descriptions differ on the exact count depending on how endings are classified.