Traditionally, several stages of borrowing from Turkic languages into Hungarian are distinguished. Of these, we are most interested in the two earlier ones, namely loans from the Bulgarian group first separated from the remaining of the Turkic languages. The first stage – “the Pre-Conquest Layer” (Róna-Tas 1988: 752) – is the contact of Bulgarian with the old Hungarian language before the arrival of the Hungarians in their present territory (10th century a.d.). These contacts (including, apparently, simultaneous contacts of Hungarians and Bulgarians with the Alans, reflected in borrowings from the ancestor of the Ossetian language in Hungarian, from Bulgarian to the early form of the Ossetian, from the early Ossetian to Bulgarian) were localised either in the Volga-Kama region, or, rather, as A. Róna-Tas tried to show, basing on borrowed plant names (Róna-Tas 2005a, 2005b), in the Don-Kuban region. These contacts apparently took place in 5th–6th centuries a.d.

The second layer of the Turkic loans generally considered “Kuman-Pecheneg” penetrated the Hungarian vocabulary in the 10th–13th centuries. Distinguishing between “Pecheneg” and “Kuman” words in Hungarian is not yet possible (although in some cases these hypotheses are offered in etymological literature). This group seems to include all formally non-Bulgarian loans, which have early fixation and underwent the Old and Middle Hungarian phonetic processes.

It seems necessary, however, to allocate even somewhat earlier contacts with the Danube Bulgarian language, already settled in the territory of Bulgaria (from the 7th century), perhaps partly via Slavic languages (some of such possible loans were mentioned by Ligeti 1986). Note that borrowings from the Danube Bulgarian and from the “Kuman-Pecheneg” took place around the same time and were subject to the same rules of adaptation. We refer this type of contacts to the second stage and the “Kuman-Pecheneg”, i.e. “Early Kypchak” type to the third one. Another quite small group of Kypchak loans of rather Nogai type penetrated as exotisms in Post-Mongolian time. Finally, there are late (after the 14th century) Turkei-Turkish borrowings in the Hungarian language, which are relatively easy to identify and which we will not specifically discuss here.