Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)

After the eclipse of the Avar state Slavs streamed into some parts of its central areas. The linguistic traces of these Slavs, especially the toponyms, stand out sharply to the philologist." I fully agree with this suggestion, but cannot regard the FinnoUgric component of the late Avar population as ever being a substratum. Surviving groups of the late Avarian chiefdom speaking some Turkic dialect, and also surviving speakers of Slavic dialects, can be considered substrates, because after the Conquest and supremacy of the Turkic Arpádian rulers it was the Hungarian tongue that became dominant. It was the underlying Slavic and locally surviving Turkic elements that became substrates, and the Turkic language of Arpád's people behaved like a linguistic superstratum. If speakers of Proto- and Old-Hungarian lived in the Carpathian Basin before the AD. 895—896 Conquest, as I firmly believe they did, then this Hungarian language after its arrival before the end of the 7th century, was the basic linguistic stratum in the Carpathian Basin on the eve of the Arpádian Conquest. The strong forces of the Seven Tribes, the outstanding personal abilities of the Arpádian family and personally of Árpád to organise and rule a state, all supported by a new military technology of mounted warfare, aided by the sophisticated use of the stirrup and considerable military efficiency, achieved domination over the existing population, and brought it into effective subjection. The above proposal of C. Renfrew lays stress upon the social organisation of the immigrant group: "They may not be large in number, but in order to bring the pre-existing population into subjection effectively, they must already display ... 'ranking': they must already have a ranked or a stratified social organisation. Sometimes they will be the agents of a state society, ... in other instances the incoming élite will not be organised on quite so complex a level. They may, rather, show the features of ...a 'chiefdom' society. Here there is still some measure of centralised organisation, but there is not the administrative bureaucracy often associated with the state. The society is not now divided into a series of separate social classes, but is organised rather by a system of ranking, based on kinship, where those most closely related to the chief occupy the positions of highest status. ... I would argue that it is only when a small incoming group is organised in such a way that it can expect to dominate a much larger resident population. 226