People and Language - The Formation of the Magyars

Rona-Tas, Andras

The lecture offers some definitions used in the lecture. The term people or ethnic group is understood as a historically evolved community with a common cultural semiotic system, whose members consciously distinguish themselves from other ethnic entities, and which possesses a permanent self-designation. The author discusses the relationship between the origin of the language and the origin of the people. In some cases the history of a language and their speakers are different (language change), in other cases language and ethnic group developed together. Then the author outlines the various types of sources on the base of which the history of the formation of the Hungarian people can be reliably reconstructed. He discusses the peculiarities of the written, the linguistic, the archaeological, the ethnographic and the indirect sources. Prominence is given to the concept of ethnic identity, for which the author quotes a text from the 6^th century. He gives the different names of the Hungarians as they appear in the contemporary sources. Finally he offers answers to the question: how could the Hungarians survive in the ocean of the Turkic, Iranian and Slavic peoples, while migrating from the South of the Urals through the Kuban and Don region to Etelköz and the Carpathian Basin?

About the lecturer