The Hunnic language, or Hunnish, was the language spoken by
Huns
The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th century AD. According to European tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was part ...
in the
Hunnic Empire, a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic tribal confederation which invaded Eastern and Central Europe, and ruled most of
Pannonian Eastern Europe, during the 4th and 5th centuries CE. A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun Empire. A contemporary report by
Priscus
Priscus of Panium (; el, Πρίσκος; 410s AD/420s AD-after 472 AD) was a 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and Greek historian and rhetorician (or sophist)...: "For information about Attila, his court and the organization of life general ...
has that Hunnish was spoken alongside
Gothic and the languages of other tribes subjugated by the Huns.
As no inscriptions or whole sentences in the Hunnic language have been preserved, the attested corpus is very limited, consisting almost entirely of
proper name
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', ''Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...
s in Greek and Latin sources.
The Hunnic language cannot be classified at present, but due to the origin of these proper names it has been compared mainly with
Turkic,
Mongolic,
Eastern Iranian languages and
Yeniseian languages
The Yeniseian languages (sometimes known as Yeniseic or Yenisei-Ostyak;"Ostyak" is a concept of areal rather than genetic linguistics. In addition to the Yeniseian languages it also includes the Uralic languages Khanty and Selkup. occasionally ...
, with a majority of scholars supporting Turkic. Other scholars consider the available evidence inconclusive and the Hunnish language therefore unclassifiable.
Corpus
Contemporary observers of the European Huns, such as
Priscus
Priscus of Panium (; el, Πρίσκος; 410s AD/420s AD-after 472 AD) was a 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and Greek historian and rhetorician (or sophist)...: "For information about Attila, his court and the organization of life general ...
and the 6th century historian
Jordanes
Jordanes (), also written as Jordanis or Jornandes, was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat widely believed to be of Gothic descent who became a historian later in life. Late in life he wrote two works, one on Roman history ('' Romana'') a ...
, preserved three words of the language of the Huns:
The words ''medos'', a beverage akin to
mead, ''kamos'', a
barley
Barley (''Hordeum vulgare''), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains, particularly in Eurasia as early as 10,000 years ago. Globally 70% of barley p ...
drink, and ''strava'', a
funeral feast, are of
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
origin. They may be of Slavic, Germanic and/or Iranian origin. Maenchen-Helfen argued that ''strava'' may have come from an informant who spoke Slavic.
All other information on the Hunnic language is contained in the form of personal and tribal names.
Possible affiliations
Many of the waves of
nomad
A nomad is a member of a community without fixed habitation who regularly moves to and from the same areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the po ...
ic peoples who swept into Eastern Europe, are known to have spoken languages from a variety of families. Several proposals for the affinities of Hunnic have been made.
Unclassifiable
Given the small corpus, a number of scholars hold the Hunnic language to be unclassifiable until further evidence, if any, is discovered.
András Róna-Tas
András Róna-Tas (born 30 December 1931) is a Hungarian historian and linguist. He was born in 1931 in Budapest. Róna-Tas studied under such preeminent professors as Gyula Ortutay and Lajos Ligeti, and received a degree in folklore and easter ...
notes that "the very scant sources of information are often mutually contradictory."
Turkic or Altaic ''sprachbund''
A number of historians and linguists including
Karl Heinrich Menges, and
Omeljan Pritsak
Omeljan Yosypovych Pritsak ( uk, Омелян Йосипович Пріцак; 7 April 1919, Luka, Sambir County, West Ukrainian People's Republic – 29 May 2006, Boston) was the first Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Har ...
feel that the proper names only allow the Hunnic language to be positioned in relationship to the
Altaic language group, which is itself a widely discredited language family. Although Menges was reserved towards the language evidence, his view of the Huns was that "there are
ethnological
Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). ...
reasons for considering them Turkic or close to the Turks". As further possibilities, Menges suggests that the Huns could have spoken a
Mongolian or
Tungusic language
The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu-Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the doz ...
, or possibly a language between Mongolian and Turkic. Pritsak analyzed 33 surviving Hunnic personal names 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
Bulgar language
Bulgar (also known as Bulghar, Bolgar, or Bolghar) is an extinct Oghur Turkic language spoken by the Bulgars.
The name is derived from the Bulgars, a tribal association that established the Bulgar state known as Old Great Bulgaria in the mid- ...
and to modern
Chuvash, but also had some important connections, especially lexical and morphological, to
Ottoman Turkish and
Yakut".
The "traditional and prevailing view is
..that the Xiongnu and/or the Huns were Turkic" speakers.
Otto Maenchen-Helfen
Otto John Maenchen-Helfen (German: Otto Mänchen-Helfen; July 26, 1894 – January 29, 1969) was an Austrian academic, sinologist, historian, author, and traveler.
From 1927 to 1930, he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and from 193 ...
argues that many tribal and proper names among the Huns appear to have originated in Turkic languages, indicating that the language was Turkic.
Hyun Jin Kim
Hyun Jin Kim (born 1982) is an Australian academic, scholar and author.
He was born in Seoul and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. Kim got his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford. He started learning Latin, German, and Fren ...
similarly concluded that it "seems highly likely then from the names that we do know, most of which seem to be Turkic, that the Hunnic elite was predominantly Turkic-speaking". Denis Sinor, while skeptical of our ability to classify Hunnic as a whole, states that part of the Hunnish elite likely spoke Turkic, though he notes that some Hunnic names cannot be Turkic in origin. The historian Peter Heather, while he supported the Turkic hypothesis as the "best guess" in 1995, has since voiced skepticism, in 2010 saying that "the truth is that we don't know what language the Huns spoke, and probably never will". Savelyev and Jeong similarly note that "the majority of the previously proposed Turkic etymologies for the Hunnic names are far from unambiguous, so no firm conclusion can be drawn from this type of data."
Yeniseian
Some scholars – most notably
Lajos Ligeti (1950/51) and
Edwin G. Pulleyblank
Edwin George "Ted" Pulleyblank (August 7, 1922 – April 13, 2013) was a Canadian sinologist and professor at the University of British Columbia. He was known for his studies of the historical phonology of Chinese.
Life and career
Edwin G. ...
(1962) – have claimed that languages of Siberia, especially
Ket – a member of the
Yeniseian
The Yeniseian languages (sometimes known as Yeniseic or Yenisei-Ostyak;"Ostyak" is a concept of areal rather than genetic linguistics. In addition to the Yeniseian languages it also includes the Uralic languages Khanty and Selkup. occasionally ...
language family – may have been a major source (or perhaps even the linguistic core) of the Xiongnu and/or Hunnic languages. First proposed by Edwin G. Pulleyblank, the theory that the Xiongnu language belonged to the Yeniseian languages was reinforced by the discovery of the Kot and Pumpokol word lists, which
Alexander Vovin
Alexander (Sasha) Vladimirovich Vovin (russian: Александр Владимирович Вовин; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022) was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Ad ...
used to create a more accurate reconstruction. Hyun Jin Kim in 2013 proposed that the Huns experienced a language flip like the
Chagatai Khanate
The Chagatai Khanate, or Chagatai Ulus ( xng, , translit=Čaɣatay-yin Ulus; mn, Цагаадайн улс, translit=Tsagaadain Uls; chg, , translit=Čağatāy Ulusi; fa, , translit=Xânât-e Joghatây) was a Mongol and later Turkicized kh ...
, switching from Yeniseian to
Oghuric Turkic after absorbing the
Dingling
The Dingling ( (174 BCE); (200 BCE); Eastern Han Chinese: *''teŋ-leŋ'' < : *''têŋ-rêŋ'') were ancient peopl ...
or
Tiele peoples.
Vajda (et al. 2013) proposed that the ruling elite of the Huns spoke a
Yeniseian language and influenced other languages in the region.
[Vajda, Edward J. (2013). Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: A History of Yeniseian Studies with an Annotated Bibliography and a Source Guide. Oxford/New York: Routledge.] The
Yeniseian people
The Yeniseian people are a Siberian population that speaks Yeniseian languages. Despite evidence pointing to the historical presence of Yeniseian populations throughout Central Siberia and Northern Mongolia, only the Ket people survive today. T ...
were likely assimilated later by Turkic and Mongolic groups.
Alexander Savelyev and Choongwon Jeong criticize the Yeniseian proposal by Pulleyblank and note that the more convincing Yeniseian words may be shared cultural vocabulary that was non-native to both the Xiongnu and the Yeniseians.
Indo-European
All three words described as "Hunnic" by ancient sources appear to be Indo-European.
A number of scholars suggest that a Germanic language, possibly
Gothic, may have coexisted with another Hunnic language as the ''
lingua franca'' of the Hunnic Empire. Maenchen-Helfen suggests that the words ''medos'' and ''kamos'' could possibly be of Germanic origin. He argues that ''Attila'', ''Bleda'', ''Laudaricus'', ''Onegesius'', ''Ragnaris'', and ''Ruga'' are Germanic, while Heather also includes the names ''
Scottas
Scottas or Skottas (fl. 448 AD) was a Hun nobleman, ambassador and advisor. He was the brother of Onegesius
Onegesius ( grc-gre, Ὀνηγήσιος, Onegesios) was a powerful Hunnic ''logades'' (minister) who supposedly held power second only to ...
'' and ''
Berichus''. Kim questions the Germanic etymologies of ''Ruga'', ''Attila'', and ''Bleda'', arguing that there are "more probable Turkic etymologies." Elsewhere, he argues that the Germanicization of Hunnic names may have been a conscious policy of the Hunnic elite in the Western part of the Empire.
Maenchen-Helfen also classified some names as having roots in
Iranian
Iranian may refer to:
* Iran, a sovereign state
* Iranian peoples, the speakers of the Iranian languages. The term Iranic peoples is also used for this term to distinguish the pan ethnic term from Iranian, used for the people of Iran
* Iranian lan ...
. Christopher Atwood has argued, as one explanation for his proposed etymology of the name ''Hun'' that, "their state or confederation must be seen as the result of
Sogdian/
Baktrian ranian-speakingleadership and organization". Subjects of the Huns included Iranian-speaking
Alans
The Alans (Latin: ''Alani'') were an ancient and medieval Iranian nomadic pastoral people of the North Caucasus – generally regarded as part of the Sarmatians, and possibly related to the Massagetae. Modern historians have connected the A ...
and
Sarmatians
The Sarmatians (; grc, Σαρμαται, Sarmatai; Latin: ) were a large confederation of ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic peoples of classical antiquity who dominated the Pontic steppe from about the 3rd century BC to the 4th cen ...
, Maenchen-Helfen argues that the Iranian names were likely borrowed from the Persians and finds none prior to the 5th century; he takes this to mean that the Alans had little influence inside of Attila's empire. Kim, however, argues for a considerable presence of Iranian-speakers among the Huns.
The word ''strava'' has been argued to be of
Slavic origin and to show a presence of Slavic speakers among the Huns. Peter Heather, however, argues that this word "is certainly a very slender peg upon which to hang the claim that otherwise undocumented Slavs played a major role in Attila's empire". In the 19th century, some Russian scholars argued that the Huns as a whole had spoken a Slavic language.
Uralic
In the 19th century, some scholars, such as German
Sinologist Julius Heinrich Klaproth, argued that the Huns had spoken a
Finno-Ugric
Finno-Ugric ( or ; ''Fenno-Ugric'') or Finno-Ugrian (''Fenno-Ugrian''), is a traditional grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except the Samoyedic languages. Its formerly commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is ba ...
language and connected them with the ancient
Hungarians
Hungarians, also known as Magyars ( ; hu, magyarok ), are a nation and ethnic group native to Hungary () and historical Hungarian lands who share a common culture, history, ancestry, and language. The Hungarian language belongs to the Urali ...
.
Possible script
It is possible that a written form of Hunnic existed and may yet be identified from artifacts. Priscus recorded that Hunnic secretaries read out names of fugitives from a written list.
Franz Altheim
Franz Altheim (6 October 1898 – 17 October 1976) was a German classical philologist and historian who specialized in the history of classical antiquity. During the 1930s and 1940s, Altheim served the Nazi state as a member of Ahnenerbe, a ...
considered it was not Greek or Latin, but a script like the
Oguric Turkic of the
Bulgars. He argued that the runes were brought into Europe from
Central Asia
Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...
by the Huns, and were an adapted version of the old
Sogdian alphabet
The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdia. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, a descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of t ...
in the Hunnic (Oghur Turkic) language.
Zacharias Rhetor
Zacharias of Mytilene (c. 465, Gaza – after 536), also known as Zacharias Scholasticus or Zacharias Rhetor, was a bishop and ecclesiastical historian.
Life
The life of Zacharias of Mytilene can be reconstructed only from a few scattered rep ...
wrote that in 507/508 AD, Bishop Qardust of
Arran went to the land of the Caucasian Huns for seven years, and returned with books written in the Hunnic language. There is some debate as to whether a
Xiongnu
The Xiongnu (, ) were a tribal confederation of nomadic peoples who, according to ancient Chinese sources, inhabited the eastern Eurasian Steppe from the 3rd century BC to the late 1st century AD. Modu Chanyu, the supreme leader after 20 ...
-
Xianbei
The Xianbei (; ) were a Proto-Mongolic ancient nomadic people that once resided in the eastern Eurasian steppes in what is today Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Northeastern China. They originated from the Donghu people who splintered into th ...
runic system existed, and was part of a wider Eurasian script which gave rise to the
Old Turkic alphabet
The Old Turkic script (also known as variously Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script, Turkic runes) was the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic khanates from the 8th to 10th centuries to record the Old Tu ...
in the 8th century.
Footnotes
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{{Huns
Extinct languages of Europe
Extinct languages of Asia
Unclassified languages of Europe
Unclassified languages of Asia
Languages attested from the 4th century
Languages extinct in the 6th century
Huns
Hunno-Bulgar languages