Ethnic Hungarians are known as Magyars. They are descendent from a wandering tribes which came from an region between the river Volga and the Ural Mountains. They are an Asiatic race, related most closely to the Mongols. Around the year 896, this tribe settled in a fertile area across from the Carpathian mountains: modern day Hungary.

The Magyar language is a part of the Ural-Altaic family, making the closest linguistic neighbors of Hungary the Finns, Estonians, and Vogul and Ostiak people of the former Soviet Union. These people are no more than distant links, however. This isolated linguistic heritage, along with a history of conflict with certain neighbors beginning in the ninth century, contributes to a certain cultural isolation.