Old Hungarian small letter ej

It marks the Hungarian j sound. In a Latin transliteration, this sound is written j. Inside a word, neighboring letters show how the word reads.

Old Hungarian was developed to write Hungarian. The name rovásírás means “incised writing.” The wider tradition also had a practical historical use: shepherds carved livestock tallies on sticks that were then split, leaving matching halves for the parties to check. Historians place the script’s development in the 5th–8th centuries and its arrival in the Carpathian Basin—the region around the Carpathian Mountains—in the 9th century. Short inscriptions survive from the 12th–13th centuries; the earliest surviving alphabet list dates to about 1483. Some 10th-century attributions remain debated.

The ancestry of Old Hungarian is debated. Historians compare it with Old Turkic, an older Turkic writing tradition, and have proposed a shared ancestor or a route by which the scripts influenced each other. Its angular, rune-like shapes do not make it a descendant of Germanic Futhark, the runic alphabet: resemblance is not ancestry.

What can the wider script signal in public?

After the Latin alphabet became Hungary’s official spelling system, Old Hungarian largely left public writing, though it survived in regional and occupational settings. From the last third of the 20th century, revival groups brought it back through teaching, calligraphy, books, children’s materials and decoration. Schools in this revival differ over expanded letter sets, especially how they mark long vowels.

Public uses documented in Hungary and Hungarian communities as of 2022 include heritage signs and projects; the script can also frame nationalist or irredentist politics—claims about reclaiming territory. Readers who know the letters may see Hungarian spelling, while someone who cannot read them may encounter the script chiefly as a heritage marker. The political reading comes from the wider setting, not from 𐳒 alone.