Our department faculty member, Associate Professor Hakan AYDEMİR, has conducted a linguistics research based on Chinese sources on the ethnic and linguistic origins of the Székelys, who speak a dialect of Hungarian in Erdel and see themselves as Hun descendants and successors of Attila. This research has sparked significant interest in Hungary.
Our professor's solution to the "Székely Problem", which has been debated in scientific literature for two hundred years and described as "unsolvable," using historical linguistics methods, resulted in two interviews summarizing these research findings being published in Hungary's leading weekly magazines, DEMOKRATA and MANDINER.
The research, first published in Turkish in 2021 and then in Hungarian in 2023, presents that the Székelys were originally a Turkic tribe that migrated from Mongolia to Eastern Europe with the Huns in the 4th century, and from there to the Carpathian region in the first half of the 5th century, showing how they changed their culture and language. The study identifies a series of Turkish heritage words (e.g., kön-, csikkan-, csiszlik, gilán, gilány, killán, kellán, kirlan, üver, surmó ~ surmók) in the Székely dialect of Hungarian, which are not found in standard Hungarian or any other Hungarian dialect and were previously unknown.
The study also includes a system developed to model each stage of language change, language loss, and language death processes resulting from cultural changes of the Eurasian steppe peoples. Our professor has applied this system, previously used for the Tocharian → Turkish language change process, to the Székely language change process: 1. event1 → 2. event2 → 3. preparatory event → 4. (trigger event) religious conversion or faith change → 5. cultural change → 6. social change → 7. loss of cultural prestige → 8. loss of linguistic prestige → 9. bilingualism → 10. language loss → 11. language shift → 12. language death
You can access the interview in DEMOKRATA here.
You can access the interview in MANDINER here.
You can access the Hungarian version of the research here.
For the Turkish version of the research, see Hakan Aydemir, Old Turkic Tribal Names as Sources of Turkish History – An Etymological Study, pp. 99-324.
