• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Hungary - People

Like many other European countries, Hungary faces low birthrates and a declining population. In 2023, the number of live births in Hungary hit a historic low and the population shrunk by 15,000 people, according to data from Hungary's Central Statistics Office. Over the past decade, Hungary's population has fallen from around 10 million to 9.7 million. According to the United Nations’ 2017 Revision of World Population Prospects report, a quarter of Central and East Europe’s population could vanish by the end of the century unless a big change happens. Only six million people are expected to live in Hungary by 2100.

Hungary's population has been declining for years and there's a brain drain as young people head elsewhere in the EU for work. The "slave law" as it's been dubbed, means employers can now demand that some employees work 400 hours overtime. The previous limit had been 250 hours. The right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, said the law will help relieve the current shortage of labour in Hungary‘s booming manufacturing sector and allow workers to earn more. Well-educated people take advantage of free movement within Europe and find opportunities abroad. Young people are moving to the West in droves - in Hungary the figure is 6 percent of the total population. The share of highly skilled EU28 movers has been increasing regularly over the period 2014-2017, with the largest increases being recorded, at country level, in Hungary (+51 percent).

Demographers are particularly interested in women over the age of 40, a cohort that provided insights into women being permanently childfree instead of just postponing parenthood. In that group, according to recently published results of Hungary's 2022 census, both the number and the proportion of childfree people are on the rise.

Hungary has begun to take note of this phenomenon and has implemented some changes in politics and the economy nationally. In 2015, among the programmes launched by the central government to fight brain drain is the ‘Gyere Haza, Fiatal!’ (Come home, young people!) addressed to young Hungarians living in the United Kingdom to convince them to come back to their country of origin through the provision of tailored assistance in finding a job.

Since taking office in 2010, the Orbán Government has pursued policy that gives priority to families as the core of Hungarian society in both economic and cultural terms. In 2016, as an extension of the family first home benefit, the government will pay up to 10 million HUF in grant assistance to couples for the purchase of new homes. To be eligible, the couples agree to have three children within ten years and, furthermore, may apply for an additional loan of 10 million HUF for a term of twenty-five years at an interest rate that may not exceed 3 percent.

Prime Minister Orbán in his regular interview with Hungary’s public Kossuth Radio on 25 May 2018 said that the question of demography will feature as a top priority in his fourth government because it determines whether “there is a future for Hungary” and whether “the Hungarian nation can survive.” PM Orbán aims to transform Hungary into a demographically self-sustaining country by 2030 through the implementation of a “comprehensive family policy.” Before adopting such policy, he said, a national consultation on childbearing and child-rearing will be held.

While “liberal democracy has been exhausted,” the prime minister said, “Christian democracy can defend us from migration, it protects our borders and supports our families.” On liberal democracy, “in theory it might still work,” he said, “but in practice, liberal democracy fails to deliver.”

In power since 2010, Fidesz is trying to halt this population decline without relying on immigration, as other European countries have done. Speaking in a 2022 radio interview, populist nationalist-conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has five children, said, "We want to leave the country to our own children, not to foreigners."

People's decision to have children is complicated by Orban's government changing its policies -- regularly implementing new measures and revoking others. For instance, the government's popular Family Home Creation Discount (CSOK), a program that gave financial assistance to families to purchase, build, or expand homes, had ended by 2024. It was replaced by CSOK Plusz, a similar subsidy but with new rules, and Village CSOK, which is only applicable in certain rural areas and is tied to continuous employment.

Ethnic groups in Hungary include Magyar (nearly 90%), Romany, German, Serb, Slovak, and others. The majority of Hungary's people are Roman Catholic; other religions represented are Calvinist, Lutheran, Jewish, Baptist, Adventist, Pentecostal, and Unitarian. Magyar is the predominant language. As a result of population transfers after World War II, Hungary became one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in Eastern Europe. Unlike most Europeans, Hungarians trace their lineage to the Finno-Ugric people--an Asiatic tribe. For this reason, Hungarians have long felt themselves to be distinct from the other peoples who live in their midst.

Ethnic discrimination -- except toward the Gypsies -- was almost nonexistent in Hungary in the 1980s. Particularly after the late 1960s, the government had made great efforts to ensure fair and equal treatment for minority nationalities. Foreign policy considerations partially explained this liberal policy toward minorities. The Romanian and, to a lesser extent, the Czechoslovak governments subjected Hungarians in their countries to many kinds of discrimination. To provide these governments with incentives to relax their pressure against Hungarian minorities, Budapest pursued very liberal policies toward its own national minorities and sought to make its minority policies a model for other countries in Eastern Europe.

The Hungarian people are thought to have originated in an ancient Finno-Ugric population that originally inhabited the forested area between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. Sometime between the first and fifth centuries AD, after the Ugric and Finnic peoples had split, Ugric tribes in the eastern portion of the territory moved farther south, intermingling with nomadic Bulgar-Turkish peoples. Some of these tribes settled in the Carpathian Basin in the ninth century A.D. and became the direct ancestors of today's inhabitants of Hungary. The proper name for the largest ethnic group in Hungary is Magyar. The word is a derivative of Megyeri, supposedly the name of one of the original ten Magyar tribes. Magyar refers specifically to both the language and the ethnic group. The words Hungary and Hungarian are derivatives of a Slavicized form of the Turkic words on ogur, meaning "ten arrows," which may have referred to the number of Magyar tribes.

Hungarian is the country's only official language. It is a member of the Finno-Ugric family of languages, unrelated to the Indo-European language family, which contains the major European languages. Within Europe, Hungarian is related to Finnish, Estonian, Komi, and several lesser-known languages spoken in parts of the Ural Mountain region in the Soviet Union. It has a heavy admixture of Turkish, Slavic, German, Latin, and French words. Hungarian is written in Latin characters. The various dialects are intelligible to all Hungarians throughout the country.

The deepest roots of the Hungarian language have been traced back 2500-2800 years when the forebears of today’s Hungarians lived in the northwestern Urals region. Philologists place Hungarian on the Ugrian branch of Finno-Ugrian within the Uralic family of languages. Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet; nouns are not gender-specific. The 17 different grammatical cases and complicated rules of conjugation represent some of the most difficult obstacles for foreigners interested in mastering the Hungarian language.

Over the course of time, the Hungarian language has picked up many words from other languages. The earliest surviving record of written Hungarian – in total just six words – is in the founding deed (penned mostly in Latin in 1055) of the Benedictine Abbey at Tihany on Lake Balaton. Today, this deed of foundation is on display in the library of one of Hungary’s World Heritage monuments, the Benedictine Monastery of Pannonhalma. The oldest extant manuscript written entirely in Hungarian – the Funeral Oration and Prayer comprising 190 words – dates from the last quarter of the 12th century.

Driven by Enlightenment principles, the goal of the late 18th century language reform movement was to replace the Latin and German languages dominant in intellectual life with a modern Hungarian language appropriate both for spoken, everyday usage and written literary works. This endeavor led directly to the remarkable flowering of Hungarian literature experienced in the 19th century.

Today, nearly 15 million people speak Hungarian. In addition to the 10 million who live in Hungary, several million ethnic Hungarians resident in neighbouring countries maintain Hungarian as their mother tongue. Furthermore, there is a considerable Hungarian diaspora living in West Europe, North and South America and Australia.

The lands inhabited by Hungarian speakers have been maintained, islandlike, in the center of Europe, ringed on all sides by peoples speaking Latin, Germanic and Slav tongues, for more than one thousand years. In fact, the deepest roots of the Hungarian language have been traced back 2500-2800 years when the forebears of today's Hungarians lived in the northwestern Urals region. This explains why philologists place Hungarian on the Ugrian branch of Finno-Ugrian within the Uralic family of languages.

The oldest extant manuscript written entirely in Hungarian - the Funeral Oration and Prayer comprising 190 words - dates from the last quarter of the 12th century. An extremely early poem, the Old-Hungarian Lament of Mary, has been dated to the middle of the 13th century. Just 37 lines long, it is the moving tale of Mary grieving for her crucified son, Jesus Christ. Both of these unique treasures are preserved in the National Széchényi Library in Budapest.

Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet; nouns are not gender-specific. The 17 different grammatical cases and complicated rules of conjugation represent some of the most difficult obstacles for foreigners interested in mastering the Hungarian language.

Experts believe that the population of Hungary in 2100 will only be the 62.5% of the population of 2000. Regarding some of the indicators, the total fertility rate (live births per woman) of Hungary dropped dramatically between 1980 and 1990. The rate is currently 1.40 but it is expected to increase to 1.74 by 2100. The Hungarian life expectancy at birth rate is also expected to increase by the end of the century. The current 76.1 years will grow to 86.7 years. The under-five mortality rate (deaths under age five per 1,000 live births) is expected to drop from 5 to 2.1.

When whole regions become empty, villages are reconquered by nature, pension systems implode and there is nobody left to meet the growing need of caring for the ageing population, then sooner or later this will become a problem for the whole European Union.