The Huns were a heterogenous, multi-ethnic tribal confederation during the 4th and 5th centuries. A contemporary reports that the Hunnic Empire had a Hunnic language, or "Hunnish", which was spoken alongside Gothic and the languages of other tribes subjugated by the Huns^[1][2][3] A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun pax.^[4] Roman sources, e.g. Priscus, recorded that Latin, Gothic, "Hun" and other local "Scythian" languages were spoken. Based on etymological interpretation of the words strava and medos, and subsequent historical appearance of Slavic languages in this region, these other languages have been taken to include a form of proto-Slavic.^[5]

The literary records for this language are sparse, consisting of a few names and three non-Turkic words, thus scholars currently conclude that the Hunnic language cannot presently be classified, and there is no firm scholarly consensus on its affinities.^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Surviving material [edit]

Priscus and Jordanes preserve only a few names and three words of the language of the Huns, which has been studied for more than a century and a half. These sources do not give the meaning of any of the names, only of the three words.

There exists a large number of Western Eurasian inscriptions on vessels and other objects in several undeciphered and possibly related runiform scripts. Decipherment work is ongoing. It has been suggested by Professor Azgar Mukhamediev of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan that some of these inscriptions are in an unidentified Turkic language using a script he calls Turanian. The name of one of Attila's sons, Dengizich, supposedly appears as Khan Diggiz on one such vessel, thereby suggesting that the language is Hunnic.^[11]

Possible affiliations [edit]

Altaic [edit]

A number of historians and linguists including Peter Heather and Karl Heinrich Menges felt that the evidence only allowed the Hunnic language to be positioned in the broad group of Altaic languages.^[12][13]

Turkic [edit]

Notable studies include that of Pritsak 1982, "The Hunnic Language of the Attila Clan.",^[14] who studied the names of known Huns and concluded, "It was not a Turkic language, but one between Turkic and Mongolian, probably closer to the former than the latter. The language had strong ties to Old Bulgarian and to modern Chuvash, but also had some important connections, especially lexical and morphological, to Ottoman and Yakut... The Turkic situation has no validity for Hunnic, which belonged to a separate Altaic group."

Many authorities suppose that Hunnic may have been mainly Turkic or a close relation of Turkic, possibly a member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family, to which Bulgar, Khazar, Turkic Avar and Chuvash also probably belong.^{[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]} All except for Chuvash are extinct and known only from very scant records. Maenchen-Helfen held that many of the tribal names among the Huns were Turkic.^{[dubious – discuss][24]} Although K. H. Menges was reserved on the language evidence, his view of the Huns was that "there are ethnological reasons for considering them Turkic or close the Turks."^[12]

Indo-European [edit]

Many of the waves of nomadic peoples who swept into Eastern Europe, such as Magyars, Mongols and Alans, are known not to be Turkic. According to Maenchen-Helfen there are three known words possibly of Hunnic origin (medos, kamos, strava). They do not seem to be Turkic,^[24] but probably a satem Indo-European language similar to Slavic and Dacian.^[25] Maenchen-Helfen suggests that "strava" may have come from an informant who spoke Slavic. Other names were classified as Germanic^[26] and Iranian,^[27] which also suggests that the Hunnic language could have been Indo-European^{[citation needed]} instead of Turkic. The Gothic language was widely used, described as not being Hunnic, and learned by non-Gothic subjects of the Huns.^[28]

Uralic [edit]

Attempts have been made to identify the Hunnic language as Hungarian. These have not achieved scholarly approval. "the thesis that Kéẓai, who dedicated his Gesta Hungarorum to Ladislaus IV (1272–1290), preserved genuine Magyar traditions about the Huns has long been refuted. Eighty years ago Hodgkin wrote: "The Hungarian traditions no more fully illustrate the history of Attila than the Book of Mormon illustrates the history of the Jews.""^[29] Hungarian legends and histories from medieval times onwards assume close ties with the Huns. The name Hunor is preserved in legends and (with a few Hunnic names, such as Attila) is used as a given name in modern Hungary and in Turkey as Atilla and Onur respectively. Some Hungarian people share the belief that the Székelys, a Hungarian ethnic group living in modern-day Transylvania, are descended from a group of Huns who remained in the Carpathian Basin after 454; this myth was recorded in the medieval Gesta Hungarorum.^[30]

Xiongnu [edit]

It has been suggested that the Hunnic language was related to that of the Xiongnu, itself of unknown affiliation.^[31][32]

Notes [edit]

Bibliography [edit]

• Clark, Larry. 1998. "Chuvash." In: Johanson & Csató, pp. 434–452.
• Gmyrya, L. 1995. Hun country at the Caspian Gate: Caspian Dagestan during the epoch of the Great Movement of Peoples. Makhachkala: Dagestan Publishing.
• Golden, Peter B. 1998. "The Turkic peoples: A historical sketch." In: Johanson & Csató, pp. 16–29.
• Heather, Peter. 1995. "The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe." English Historical Review 110.4–41.
• Johanson, Lars & Éva Agnes Csató (ed.). 1998. The Turkic languages. London: Routledge.
• Johanson, Lars. 1998. "The history of Turkic." In: Johanson & Csató, pp. 81–125.[6]
• Johanson, Lars. 1998. "Turkic languages." In: Encyclopaedia Britannica. CD 98. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 5 September 2007.[7]
• Johanson, Lars. 2000. "Linguistic convergence in the Volga area." In: Gilbers, Dicky, Nerbonne, John & Jos Schaeken (ed.). Languages in contact. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi. (Studies in Slavic and General linguistics 28.), pp. 165–178.[8]
• Johanson, Lars. 2007. Chuvash. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier.
• Kemal, Cemal. 2002. "The Origins of the Huns: A new view on the eastern heritage of the Hun tribes." (Text edited from conversations with Kemal Cemal, Turkey, 1 November 2002.) In: The History Files, Features for Europe, Barbarian Europe.[9]
• Krueger, John. 1961. Chuvash Manual. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications.
• Maenchen-Helfen, Otto J. 1973. The world of the Huns: Studies in their history and culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.[10]
• Mukhamadiev, Azgar G. 1995. "The inscription on the plate of Khan Diggiz." In: In: Problems of the lingo-ethno-history of the Tatar people. Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, pp. 36–83. (ISBN 5-201-08300, in Russian). Translated from the Russian into English, www.turkicworld.org.[11]
• Pritsak, Omeljan. 1982. "The Hunnic Language of the Attila Clan." Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 6, pp. 428–476.
• Róna-Tas, András. 1998. "The reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the genetic question." In: Johanson & Csató, pp. 67–80.
• Schönig, Claus. 1997–1998. "A new attempt to classify the Turkic languages I–III." Turkic Languages 1:1.117–133, 1:2.262–277, 2:1.130–151.
• Samoilovich, A. N. 1922. Some additions to the classification of the Turkic languages. Petrograd.[12]
• Thompson, E.A. 1948. A History of Attila and the Huns. London: Oxford University Press. Reedited by Peter Heather. 1996. The Huns. Oxford: Blackwell.

External links [edit]

• The World of the Huns by Otto Maenchen-Helfen, University of California Press, 1973. Chapter: IX. Language

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