Introduction

The Turanian language family that plays a very important role in Hungarian linguistics as well as history, comprises the Finno-Ugric (or, together with the Samoyed languages, the Uralic) language family (FU) on the one side and the Altaic language family (A) on the other side. While the existence of an Altaic language family has always been doubtful, the existence of a Finno-Ugric or Uralic family has become controversial only very recently. This latter fact is the more astonishing, because Hungarian - besides Finnish the most prominent member of this little family - was originally not considered to have genetical relationships to Finnish and the languages close to Finnish, although a first attempt to group Hungarian and Finnish together goes back to the 18th century (Sajnovics). In this small contribution, I will show the language data necessary to prove that both FU and A cannot be considered to be linguistic families. At the end of this contribution will stand the question, if the existence of the Turanian language family is thus a phantom or not.