The main period of Hungarian language reform ran from the 1770s to the 1830s. In their efforts to revive, recreate, or refine the vernacular, Hungarian activists shared the goals of other national linguistic movements in the region: they undertook to define and standardize the Magyar language, prove its antiquity as well as its outstanding semantic and poetic capacities, and to promote its literature and increase its reading public. Far from being a straightforward development, their efforts were permeated by controversial and often self-contradictory elements.

In his 1778 pamphlet Magyarság (“Magyardom”) György Bessenyei, then a retired officer of Maria Theresa’s Hungarian Guards and an honorary custodian of the Court Library in Vienna, argued that the vernacular offered the best means to spread the ideas of the Enlightenment. But Bessenyei went no further than its usefulness for the diffusion of knowledge: the vernacular for him was by no means the expression of a self-contained national culture connecting a Hungarian-speaking ethnic community. The legitimization of the vernacular as the language of politics and scholarship also remained within the boundaries of the concept of natio Hungarica, i.e. a multilingual body politic: Bessenyei’s fellow-Guardsman Sándor Báróczi in his 1790 pamphlet A védelmeztetett magyar nyelv (“The Hungarian language defended”), written for an essay competition on the relative uses of Latin and Hungarian, argued for the vernacular supplementing but not replacing Latin. All the same, he also claimed that industry and commerce would benefit if the kingdom’s other nationalities learned Hungarian.

In the multi-ethnic and multilingual environment of the 18th-century Kingdom of Hungary, with half of the population not speaking Hungarian, the choice of language was motivated more by erudition and social status than by ethnicity, let alone nationhood. The official language of politics, state and county administration, scholarship, legislation, literature, and education was Latin. Conveying the prestige of classical erudition, Latin was perceived as a viable medium of public communication spanning a wide ethnic diversity. When in 1784 Joseph II issued a decree imposing the use of German in the entire Empire, he raised a storm of indignation; even the Hungarian-speaking nobility refused to abandon its accustomed Latin. Before the coronation of Leopold II in 1790, the new emperor made a settlement with the Hungarian nobility to return to Latin in state administration “for the time being”, suggesting that in the unspecified future it would be replaced by Hungarian.

While the political class largely remained in favour of Latin, Enlightenment Patriotism stimulated interest in the vernacular among men of letters. The rise of Hungarian-language literature from the 1770s (supplanting the vigorous Neo-Latin poetry of the age) was frequently described in terms of the Magyar language awakening from its historical slumber or from its death. The physician/historian Sámuel Decsy’s 1790 Pannoniai Féniksz (“Phoenix of Pannonia”) saw Hungarian culture rising from its ashes. In his 1797 A Magyar nyelv feléledése (“The re-awakening of the Magyar language”) the poet Mihály Csonokai Vitéz introduced his (ultimately fruitless) endeavour to compile a comprehensive historical and sociological thesaurus of the “sweet mother tongue”. Csokonai blamed his ancestors, who “only minded the sword”, for the uncultivated state of Hungarian and urged the abolition of the “language of the dead” both in literature and in scholarship.

This rising cult of the Hungarian language was driven by neo-humanist and neoclassicist ideas, rather than by Romantic Nationalism. Following the aesthetic principle of aemulatio, the aim was to demonstrate the capability of Hungarian to express high artistry, i.e. the reproduction of ancient metres, and the expression of a wide range of emotional or intellectual subtleties. The intention to improve Hungarian style and vocabulary triggered a large amount of translations (prose and poetry, from Latin, German, and French) produced from the 1770s; the aim was less to provide Hungarian-language versions of authors like Horace or Pope to those unable to read the original, than to demonstrate the merits of Hungarian.

From the late 18th century the Magyar language also became a fervent topic of scholarly enquiry. In public essay competitions addressing linguistics and language politics, the questions of grammar, spelling, and style intertwined with the dilemmas of the aesthetic and political status of the vernacular.

The urge to improve came hand in hand with efforts to regulate. Grammatical conflicts around 1800 pitted the Piarist priest Miklós Révai and the Paulite monk Ferenc Verseghy against each other. Révai’s 1803-05 2-volume Elaboratio grammaticae hungaricae and Verseghy’s 1816-17 Analyticae institutionum linguae hungaricae both sought to purify Hungarian by eliminating alien structures. Both relied on Adelung. Verseghy regarded present-day common usage as the norm and wanted to improve the contemporary language for future perfection. Révai, convinced of Hungarian’s kinship to Hebrew (his Hebrew-Hungarian comparative dictionary remained in manuscript), wanted to reconstruct and codify ideal grammatical rules from an imaginary Old Hungarian (i.e. the vernacular used prior to the 18th-century settling of non-Magyars in the largely depopulated post-Ottoman-occupation Hungary). Characteristically, Révai started his 1803 inauguration speech as the chair of the Hungarian department at the University of Pest by crying out: “We cannot speak Hungarian” – meaning that the proper form of the vernacular had to be taught even to native speakers. Each accused the other of Slavic influences. The clash of their historicist and contemporary views became most visible in orthography: in the Ypsilon War, Révai fought for an analytical-etymological spelling (látja), Verseghy for a pronunciation-based one (láttya). Both wanted to impose their system as compulsory, Verseghy through a political decree, Révai by way of scholarly endorsement. In the event, Révai’s analytical-etymological spelling was officially adopted in the 1832 regulations of the Hungarian Academy, supervised by the poet Mihály Vörösmarty.

Following these grammar wars, Ferenc Kazinczy called for an aesthetic reconstitution of Hungarian by constructing a distinct literary language, a refined register of Schriftsprache for aesthetic purposes. This was to be achieved mainly by translating German neoclassicist poetry. In Kazinczy’s ideal of polished Hungarian there was no room for dialects (except for his own North-East Hungarian one), and he urged his fellow poets to weed out the traces of their Transylvanian or Transdanubian idioms.

The jurist and historian László Teleki (1764–1821) feared the coming of a “new Babel” of various versions of Hungarian due to unrestrained reform initiatives. Teleki considered the educated public the true legislator of the vernacular, and contrasted artificially regulated and self-regulating languages by way of the analogous contrast between French and English garden architecture. As he pointed out, language reform also had political overtones: the vernacular (to be preserved in unaltered form as a historical heirloom) was analogous to the “ancient constitution”, that is, the political legacy of feudal nationhood.

In fact, heedless linguistic engineering, and the introduction of thousands of neologisms (recovered from archaic or dialect usage, or else compounded out of pre-existing lexemes), frequently did lead to absurd outcomes. An 1807 novel by a certain János Folnesics even attempted to introduce grammatical gender into Hungarian. Similar disfigurations were parodied (and counter-parodied) as early as 1813 and 1815 by the pamphlets Mondolat (a gibberish title mixing “thought”, gondolat, and “utterance”, mondat) and Felelet a Mondolatra (“Response to Mondolat”, partly written by the young Ferenc Kölcsey), giving hilarious examples of a new, over-refined, but incomprehensible Hungarian. On the whole, the movement of language reform between the 1770s and the 1820s lastingly affected every layer of the Hungarian language (especially the vocabulary). On the other hand, it also brought about a deep fracture in language history, making it difficult to read pre-1800 Hungarian texts today.

Nevertheless, the adequate language of scholarship remained Latin even in the eyes of the most fervent ideologues of the vernacular: both Révai and Verseghy wrote their Hungarian grammars in Latin. Even in the early 1800s, some saw the introduction of vernacular Hungarian into education as a “road to barbarism”. Multilingualism also remained widespread in literature. Latin poetry persisted in late 18th literary periodicals, and a handful of poets in the 1810-20s (Ferenc Vályi Nagy, László Ungvárnémeti Tóth) chose to write in Ancient Greek. Even Kazinczy claimed to find writing iambic metres more convenient in German than in Hungarian, and Kölcsey, the author of Hymnus, admitted to writing more easily in Latin than in Hungarian.

From the 1820-30s the idea of an aesthetically refined language ideal imposed from above was increasingly replaced by the Romantic notion of the genius of language. The notion of the collective bond of language supplanted the multilingual political framework of the natio Hungarica. The Benedictine Izidor Guzmics (1786–1839) argued in his A nyelvnek hármas befolyása (“The triple influence of language on man”, 1822) that even those who had been living in Hungary since the days of St Stephen could not consider themselves Hungarian if they did not speak the Magyar language: they could only qualify as “state Hungarians” (magyarországi) as opposed to “national Hungarians” (Magyar nemzetségbeli). There were widespread calls to abandon polyglottism (a still widespread phenomenon of the age that Vörösmarty’s 1834 epigram condemned as the sign of a “new Babel”).

Scholarly interest reached a new level of nationalist zeal in the historian István Horvát’s absurd totalization of language history. In a fashion similar to many of his non-Hungarian contemporaries (like his arch-enemy Jan Kollár), Horvát, a disciple of Révai and his successor on the chair of Hungarian, thought Hungarian to be the ancient tongue of mankind (i.e. that of Adam and Eve) that had permeated every other vernacular (including Ancient Greek). In his 1825 Rajzolatok Horvát searched welters of documents of ancient language history and found traces of Hungarian everywhere. Turning etymologies into political allegories, Horvát considered the discovery of the language’s ancient origins tantamount to uncovering the nation’s ancient glory. (Even so, Horvát refused to deliver his university lectures in anything other than Latin, even in the 1840s.) In his 1834 A magyar nyelv metaphysicája (“The metaphysics of the Hungarian language”) János Fogarasi, a professor of law and the future co-editor of the Academy’s Hungarian dictonary, attempted to reconcile Horvát’s etymologies with the categories of a Kantian transcendental analytics, and detected inherent meaning and the manifestation of national character even in single letters.

These extreme approaches were marginalized once the attempts of language standardization reached an institutional phase, following the 1825 establishment of the Hungarian Academy. Putting aside the previous dilemmas of whether a national scholarly society should work in a prescriptive or descriptive way, the Academy’s main ambition was to impose a nationwide norm by overcoming regional and confessional particularities in spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. In 1846 the Academy published a grammar, A magyar nyelv rendszere (“A system of the Hungarian language”), and between 1862 and 1874 a 6-volume dictionary, A magyar nyelv szótára. Compiled by Gergely Czuczor and Fogarasi, it was modelled after the Grimm Wörterbuch. Other Academy publications included spelling regulations and bilingual and technical dictionaries.

Meanwhile, political developments unfolded. From 1805 the Diet was allowed to address the Viennese court both in Hungarian and Latin in parallel columns. In 1830 the Diet ordered that all public officials should know Hungarian, and in 1840 Hungarian became mandatory in the internal administration of the kingdom. Eventually, in 1844 Hungarian became the primary language of administration, education, and judiciary.

After 1867, state-driven efforts of Magyar centralism and cultural assimilation also had their linguistic counterparts. A purist ideologization of language, while attacking the legacy of the earlier language reform movement, strove to weed out the pervasive Germanisms and Latinisms from Hungarian and to ban any borrowing from non-Magyar tongues. The ideological investments of linguistic purism – first proposed by the linguist Gábor Szarvas and his tellingly titled periodical Magyar nyelvőr (“The Hungarian language guard”) – mirrored larger political efforts to strengthen the dominance of the ruling nation’s language. The intention to preserve or achieve linguistic purity corresponded to the increasing ethnic conflicts of the era, the dilemmas of assimilation amid continuing multilingualism, the rise of a metropolitan version of Hungarian with symbiotic relations to German and Yiddish, and the return of a new regionalism. The Magyarization of Hungarian society also affected the use of proper names. After the pattern used previously for the Germanization of Jewish names, name-changing in Hungary was legally regulated as early as the 1810s. In the 1840s, many major figures in the Hungarian national cultural movements changed their names to Hungarian analogues or calques: Schedel to Toldy, Petrovics to Petőfi, Hunsdorfer to Hunfalvy. (Similar transnomination trends were at work later in the century in Finland and Ireland.) In the 1880s a “Central Name-Magyarization Society” was established, encouraging people to undergo “national baptism”. A third crest in this wave of transnominations occurred in the period 1920-45.

The contested historical origin of the Magyar people had entailed linguistic problems from the late 18th century onwards. The mystery of ethnic origin was linked to the problematic question of the family appurtenance of the Hungarian language. In his 1770 Demonstratio the Jesuit János Sajnovics (1735–1785) argued that Hungarian was part of a Finno-Ugric language family, while in his 1791 Magyarok eredete (“On the origin of the Magyars”) the Franciscan Joákim Szekér (1752–1810) reinforced the long-standing belief that the Hungarians were the descendants of Attila and his Huns. The Orientalist and linguist Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (1784–1842) led a solitary expedition to the Far East, where he spent two decades in the hope of finding the place of origin of the Hungarian tribes and proof for their Hunnish descent (only to end up founding Tibetology and compiling the first Tibetan-English dictionary). The Hunnish tradition remained virulent during the mid-19th century both in the Romantic epic and historiography; the Hungarian Academy sponsored Amédée Thierry’s 1856 Histoire d’Attila, which supported the claim that the Hungarians were the European descendants of the Huns. The Orientalist Ármin Vámbéry, however, in his 1882 A magyarok eredete (“On the origin of the Hungarians”), one of the intellectual bestsellers of the time, based on the author’s extensive travels in the Middle East, argued for a theory of Turkish descent. Eventually, with the rise of positivistic linguistics and relying on the northern-Siberian expedition of the comparative linguist Antal Reguly (1818–1858), the Finno-Ugrian camp carried the day, primarily due to Pál Hunfalvy’s works on ethnography and József Budenz’s (1836–1892) 3-volume Magyar-Ugrian comparative dictionary (1873-81).