What do we know about the language of Attila the Hun?
1 Answer
Thomas Wier, linguist and Caucasologist
Written 6 May 2015
The short answer is almost nothing, but what little exists suggests the Huns were an Altaic group from Central Asia. Almost all of our ancient sources were written by late Roman/Byzantine authors who maintained an aloof disdain of the barbarian world with which they interacted, and so recorded very little of their culture. We have handed down to us precisely three words that have been claimed to be Hunnic:
medos, an alcoholic drink akin to mead;
kamos, a drink made from barley; and
strava, a funeral feast.
Which only tells us what we already knew: the Huns were heavy drinkers. These were recorded in classical sources like Priscus and Jordanes, the former of whom actually was an ambassador to the Hunnic court in the mid 5th century and so presumably heard some Hunnic spoken. Each of these words was given a Greek ending (-os, -a) and appears to have a solid Indo-European etymology. so one possibility is that the Huns spoke some form of Indo-European language, either Proto-Slavic, some form of Indo-Aryan such as Scythian or Sarmatian, or another unattested IE language on the satem-branch. But three words is rather little to go on.
The other source of data comes from the onomastic study of Hunnic names. Now, naming conventions are not always a good indication of the language a people speaks: ethnic groups under powerful foreign influence often adopt the naming conventions of that influence while maintaining their own language among themselves, e.g. Spanish names among Amerindians in Latin America, or French and English names in Sub-Saharan Africa. Contrarily, a conquering people might maintain their ancestral naming conventions while adopting the language of the conquered, such as the Normans in medieval England or the Indo-Aryan Mittani in Hurrian-speaking Syria of the late Bronze Age.
In the case of the Huns, we cannot distinguish between these possibilities and the possibility that the Huns continued to speak some Central Asian language. What is totally clear however is that the naming conventions they used drew on a specifically Altaic language, related to Chuvash, Mongol and Proto-Turkic, but identical to none of these. Here are some examples:
Attila [Αττίλα in the original sources] probably goes back to Proto-Altaic *es- 'great, old' and *til- 'sea, ocean', plus a nominative suffix -a (also found in attested Danube-Bulgar sources), with assimilation of the /s/ to the following /t/. Cf. the Pecheneg ruler Kurya (kür- 'universal' + ä). Naming of rulers aspiring to ruling 'all under heaven' or something similar was common among Central Asian warrior aristocracies.
Balamur/Balamber, the name of the oldest attested Hunnic name ca. 375 AD and an ancestor of Attila's, probably consists of a root meaning 'fierce, wild, crazy' plus a nominalizing suffix -ma 'the greatest among' plus a pluralizing suffix -r. Cf. West Mongol bala-mu-d, which means the same.
Uldin [also Ὀυλδην and Huldin] was another predecessor of Attila, ca. 395-410 AD. Cognate with Proto-Altaic *öl- 'lucky, auspicious', plus two suffixes -di- and -n. Cf. the Mongolian Ilkhan ruler of Iran's name, Öljeitü (ruled 1304-1316) > öl+je+i+tü (Mongol -je goes back regularly to -di).
Mundzuc or Mundio [Μουνδίουχ or Μουνδίο], Attila's father, goes back to munjuq 'jewel, pearl, bead' or 'flag'. This name continued in common use in central Asia into almost recent times: Qizil Munchuq, a Mongol commander in Afghanistan (ca. 1223); Munchuk Ilchikeev, a Bashkir leader of the 18th century; and Monchak, a Kalmuk leader of the 17th century.
In some cases, the names that have been handed down to us about members of the Hunnic court appear not to have been their given names, but rather were their titles at court. For example, one Adamis [Άδάμις] was the name of a steward whom the Roman ambassadors met when they dined with Queen Krekän. This name is cognate with a Turkic word that means 'gelding', and indeed the steward was a eunuch. In some cases, this was even extended jokingly, as Attila's court jester, a dwarf named Zerkon [Ζέρκων], had a name cherkü 'inner [residence] official', that was probably literally given in jest to sound humorously pompous.
Hunnish horse bridal mounts encrusted in jewels
So all this leads one to think that the Huns were indeed a Altaic tribe from Central Asia. But what do we think of the non-Turkic words preserved in the ancient sources? These probably illustrate an important aspect of Hunnic society, namely that their empire was multi-ethnic: they ruled over Germanic, Slavic, Iranian and Uralic tribes in addition to their own Turkoid ruling classes. Probably these words represent borrowings into Hunnic from one of these sources, or are simply a misunderstanding on the part of the Roman sources, and are in fact not Hunnic words at all. Work Cited
Pritsak, Omeljan. "The Hunnic Language of the Attila Clan." Harvard Ukrainian Studies (1982): 428-476.