Spoken in: Hungary and areas of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia.

Total speakers: 14.5 million.

Language family: Uralic, Finno-Ugric, Ugric, Hungarian.

Writing system: Latin alphabet (Hungarian variant).

Official status
Official language in: Hungary, European Union, Slovenia (regional language), Serbia (regional language), Austria (regional language), Various localities in Romania, Some official rights in Ukraine, Croatia and Slovakia.

Regulated by: Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language (more specifically an Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar IPA.

As one of the small number of modern European languages that do not belong to the Indo-European language family, Hungarian has always been of great interest to linguists.

There are about 14.5 million native speakers, of whom 9.5-10 million live in modern-day Hungary. Some two million speakers live in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before World War I. Of these, the largest group lives in Romania, where there are approximately 1.4 million Hungarians. Hungarian-speaking people are also to be found in Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia, as well as about a million people scattered in other parts of the world. As with many European languages, there are a few hundred thousand in the United States as well.


Classification of Hungarian

Hungarian is a Uralic language, more specifically an Ugric language. Connections between the Ugric and Finnic languages were noticed in the 1670s and established, along with the entire Uralic family, in 1717, although the classification of Hungarian continued to be a matter of political controversy into the 18th and even 19th centuries. Today the Uralic family is considered one of the best demonstrated large language families, along with Indo-European and Austronesian. The name of Hungary could be a corruption of Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to them as Ugrin (pl. Ugrove) seemed to confirm that. However, current literature favors the hypothesis that the Turkic "On-ogur" ("Ten arrows" or "Ten tribes") is the origin for the word Hungarian.

There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /aː/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, and Hungarian /h/ corresponds to Khanty /x/, while Hungarian final /z/ corresponds to Khanty final /t/. For example, Hungarian ház (IPA: ) "house" vs. Khanty xot (IPA: ) "house", and Hungarian száz (IPA: ) "hundred" vs. Khanty sot (IPA: ) "hundred".

The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular.


The Antiquity and the early Middle Ages

As Uralic linguists claim, Hungarian separated from its closest relatives approximately 3000 years ago, so the history of the language begins around 1000 BC. The Hungarians gradually changed their way of living from settled hunters to nomadic cattle-raising, probably as a result of early contacts with Iranian nomads. Their most important animals included sheep and cattle. There are no written resources on the era, thus only a little is known about it. However, research has revealed some extremely early loanwords, such as szó ('word'; from the Turkic languages) and daru ('crane', from the related Permic languages.)

The Turkic languages later, especially between the 5th and the 9th centuries, had a great influence on the language. Several words related to agriculture, to state administration or even to family relations have such backgrounds. Interestingly, Hungarian syntax and grammar was not influenced in a similarly dramatic way.


The Funeral Sermon and Prayer

The Hungarians migrated to the Carpathian Basin around 896 and got in contact with Slavic peoples, borrowing several words from them (for example tégla – "brick", mák – "poppy", or karácsony – "Christmas"). In exchange, the neighbouring Slavic languages also contain some words of Hungarian origin (such as Croatian čizma – "boot", or Serbian ašov – "spade").

The first written accounts of Hungarian, mostly personal and place names, are dated back to the 10th century. Hungarians also had their own writing system, the Old Hungarian script, but no significant texts remained from the time.


Since the foundation of the Kingdom of Hungary

The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1000, by Stephen I of Hungary. The country was a western-styled Christian state, and Latin held an important position, as it was usual in the Middle Ages.

Therefore, Hungarian was also heavily influenced by Latin. The first extant text of the language is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, written once in the 1190s. The earliest example of Hungarian religious poetry is the Old Hungarian 'Lamentations of Mary', a poem about the afflictions of Mary when she saw the death of her son. More extensive literature in the Hungarian language arose after 1300. The first Bible translation is the Hussite Bible from the 1430s.

The language lost its diphthongs, and several postpositions transformed into suffixes, such as reá 'onto' – 1055: utu rea 'onto the way'; later: útra). Vowel harmony was also developed. At one time, Hungarian used six verb tenses; today, only two (the future not being counted as one, as it's a compound formed with an auxiliary verb).

The first printed Hungarian book was published in Cracow in 1533, by Benedek Komjáti. The work's title is Az Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven, i.e. The letters of Saint Paul in the Hungarian language. In the 17th century, the language was already very similar to its present-day form, although two of the past tenses were still used. German, Italian and French loans also appeared in the language by these years.

In the 18th century, the language was incapable of clearly expressing scientific concepts, and several writers found the vocabulary a bit scant for literary purposes. Thus, a group of writers, most notably Ferenc Kazinczy, began to compensate for these imperfections. Some words were shortened (győzedelem > győzelem 'triumph'); a number of dialectical words spread nationally (e. g. cselleng 'dawdle'); extinct words were reintroduced (dísz 'décor'); a wide range of expressions were coined using the various derivative suffixes; and some other, less frequently used methods of expanding the language were utilized. This movement was called the 'language reform' (Hungarian: nyelvújítás), and produced more than ten thousand words, many of which are used actively today. The reforms lead to the installment of Hungarian as the official language over Latin in the multiethnic country in 1844.

The 19th and 20th centuries saw further standardization of the language, and differences between mutually incomprehensible dialects gradually lessened. In 1920, by signing the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost several territories, and along with these, 33% of the ethnic Hungarian population. Today, the language is official in Hungary, and regionally also in Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia.


Official status

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the European Union. Hungarian is also one of the official languages of Vojvodina and an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia: Hodoš, Dobrovnik and Lendava, along with Slovene. Hungarian is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria, Croatia, Romania, Bukovina, Zakarpattia in Ukraine, and Slovakia. In Romania and Slovakia, it is an official language at local level in all communes, towns and municipalities with an ethnic Hungarian population of over 20%.


Dialects

The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is not listed by Ethnologue, is spoken mostly in Bacău County, Romania. The Csángó minority group has been largely isolated from other Hungarians, and they therefore preserved a dialect closely resembling medieval Hungarian.


Hungarian phonology

Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes and 25 consonant phonemes. The vowel phonemes can be grouped as pairs of long and short vowels, e.g. o and ó. Most of these pairs have a similar pronunciation, only varying in their duration; the pairs <a>/<á> and <e>/<é> differ both in closedness and length, however.

Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian. Most of the consonant phonemes can occur as geminates.


Hungarian grammar

Hungarian is an agglutinative language – it uses a number of different affixes, including suffixes, prefixes and a circumfix to define the meaning or the grammatical function. Although common in English, Hungarian does not use any prepositions, but only postpositions.

There are two articles in Hungarian: a definite (’a’ before words beginning with consonants, else ’az’) and an indefinite (’egy’.) Nouns have as many as eighteen cases. Out of these, some are grammatical, e.g. the unmarked nominative (for example, az alma ’the apple’), and the accusative marked with the suffix –t (az almát). The latter is used when the noun in question is used as the object of a verb. Hungarian does not have a genitive case, and numerous English prepositions equal not to an affix, but to a postposition, such as az alma mellett ’next to the apple’. Plurals are formed using the suffix –k (az almák ’the apples’). Adjectives precede nouns, e. g. a piros alma ’the red apple’. They have three degrees, including base (piros ’red’), comparative (pirosabb ’more red’), and superlative (legpirosabb ’the most red’). If the noun takes the plural or a case, the adjective, used attributively, does not agree with it: a piros almák ’the red apples’. However, when the adjective is used in a predicative sense, it must agree with the noun: az almák pirosak ’the apples are red’.

Verbs developed a complex conjugation system during the centuries. Every Hungarian verb has two conjugations (definite and indefinite), two tenses (past and present-future), and three moods (indicative, conditional and imperative), two numbers (singular or plural), and three persons (first, second and third). Out of these features, the two different conjugations are the most characteristic: the "definite" conjugation is used for a transitive verb with a definite object. The "indefinite" conjugation is used for an intransitive verb or for a transitive verb with an indefinite object. These rules, however, do not apply everywhere. The following examples demonstrate this system:

John egy almát lát. ’John sees an apple.’
(indefinite, the apple can be any of the world’s apples)
John a piros almát látja. ’John sees the red apple.’
(definite, as it was pointed out he sees the red one)

Present tense is unmarked, while past is formed using the suffix –t or sometimes –tt: lát 'sees'; látott 'saw', past. Futurity is often expressed with the present tense, or using the auxiliary verb fog ’will’. The first most commonly applies when the sentence also defines the time of the future event, for example John pénteken moziba megy – literally ’John on Friday into cinema goes’, i.e. ’On Friday, John will go to the cinema.’ In the other case, the verb’s infinitive (formed using –ni) and the ’fog’ auxiliary verb is used: John moziba fog menni – ’John will go to the cinema.’ This is sometimes counted as a tense, especially by non-specialist publications.

Indicative mood is used in all tenses; the conditional only in the present and the past, finally the imperative just in the present. Indicative is always unmarked. Verbs also have verbal prefixes. Most of them define movement direction (lemegy – goes down, felmegy – goes up), but some of them give an aspect to the verb, such as the prefix meg-, which defines a finite action.

Hungarian word order is often mentioned as free, i.e. because of marking the object using –t, it is not always necessary to place the subject before the verb, and the object after it, as in English. This feature makes Hungarian able to focus on particular sections of the sentence – generally, the beginning of the sentence contains the most important information:

John lát egy almát. ’John sees an apple.’
(when it is important to stress that it's John, not someone else, who sees an apple)
Egy almát lát John. ’John sees an apple.’
(when it is important that it's an apple John sees, and not something else.)

Lexicon

Example with ad Hungarian English. Derived terms:
ad he is giving sth
adó tax
adózik he pays tax
adózó taxpayer
adós debtor
adósság debt
adalék aggregate n
adomány donation
adat data

Giving an exact estimate for the total word count is difficult, since it is hard to define what to call "a word" in agglutinating languages, due to the existence of compound words. To have a meaningful definition of compound words, we have to exclude such compounds whose meaning is the mere sum of its elements. The largest dictionaries from Hungarian to another language contain 120,000 words and phrases (but this may include redundant phrases as well, because of translation issues). The new desk lexicon of Hungarian language contains 75,000 words and the Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian Language (to be published in 18 volumes in the next twenty years) will contain 110,000 words. The default Hungarian lexicon is usually estimated to comprise 60,000 to 100,000 words. (Independently of specific languages, speakers actively use at most 10,000 to 20,000 words, with an average intellectual using 25-30 thousand words.) However, all the Hungarian lexemes collected from technical texts, dialects etc. would all together add up to 1,000,000 words.

Hungarian words are built around so-called word-bushes. Thus, words with similar meaning often arise from the same root.

The basic vocabulary shares a couple of hundred word roots with other Uralic languages like Finnish, Estonian, Mansi and Khanty. Examples of such include the numbers kettő 'two', három 'three', négy 'four' (cf. Finnish kaksi, kolme, neljä, Estonian kaks, kolm, neli, Mansi êèòûã kitig, õóðóì khurum, íèëà nila), as well as víz 'water', kéz 'hand, arm', vér 'blood', fej 'head' (cf. Finnish and Estonian vesi, käsi, veri, Finnish pää, Estonian pea or 'pää).

The proportion of the word roots in Hungarian lexicon is as follows: Finno-Ugric 21 %, Slavic 20 %, German 11 %, Turkic 9.5 %, Latin and Greek 6 %, Romance 2.5 %, Other of known origin 1 %, Other of uncertain origin 30%. Except for a few Latin and Greek loan-words, these differences are unnoticed even by native speakers; the words have been entirely adopted into the Hungarian lexicon. There are an increasing number of English loan-words, especially in technical fields.


Word formation

Words can be compound (as in German) and derived (with suffixes).


Compounds

Compounds are present since the Proto-Uralic era in the language. Numerous ancient compounds transformed to base words during the centuries. Today, compounds play an important role in vocabulary.

One good example for these is the word arc:

orr (nose) + száj (mouth) → orca (face) (colloquial until the end of the XIXth century and still in use in some dialects) → arc (face)

Compounds are made up of two base words: the first is the prefix, the latter is the suffix. A compound can be subordinative: the prefix is in logical connection with the suffix. If the prefix is the subject of the suffix, the compound is generally classified as a subjective one. There are objective, determinative, and adjunctive compounds as well. Some examples are given below:


Subjective:

According to current orthographic rules, a subordinative compound word has to be written as a single word, without spaces; however, if the length of a compound is over six syllables, a hyphen may be inserted at the appropriate boundary to avoid ambiguity.

Other compound words are coordinatives: there is no concrete relation between the prefix and the suffix. Subcategories include word duplications (to emphasise the meaning; olykor-olykor 'really occasionally'), twin words (where a base word and a distorted form of it makes up a compound: gizgaz, where the suffix 'gaz' means 'weed' and the prefix giz is the distorted form; the compound itself means 'inconsiderable weed'), and such compounds which have meanings, but neither their prefixes, nor their suffixes make sense (for example, hercehurca 'long-lasting, frusteredly done deed').

A compound also can be made up by multiple (i.e., more than two) base words: in this case, at least one word element, or even both the prefix and the suffix is a compound. Some examples:

elme + (gyógy + intézet ) → elmegyógyintézet (asylum)
(hadi + fogoly ) + (munka + tábor ) → hadifogoly-munkatábor (work camp of prisoners of war)


Noteworthy lexical items

Two words for "red"
There are two basic words for "red" in Hungarian, piros and vörös (variant: veres; compare with Estonian 'verev' or Finnish 'verevä'). (They are basic in the sense that one is not a sub-type of the other, like e.g. scarlet is a kind of red.) The word vörös is related to vér "blood". When they refer to an actual difference in colour (as on a colour chart), vörös usually refers to the deeper hue of red. While many languages have multiple names for this colour, Hungarian is unique in having two distinct basic colour words for red.

However, the two words are also used independently of the above in collocations. Piros is first taught to children, as it is generally used to describe inanimate, artificial things, or things seen as cheerful or neutral, while vörös typically refers to animate or nature-related things (biological, geological, physical and astronomical objects), as well as serious or emotionally charged subjects.

When the rules outlined above are in contradiction, typical collocations usually prevail. In some cases where a typical collocation doesn't exist, the use of either of the two words may be equally adequate.

Examples:

Expressions where "red" typically translates to piros: a red road sign, the red line of the Budapest Metro, a holiday shown in red in the calendar, ruddy complexion, the red nose of a clown, some red flowers (those with a "cold" property, e.g. tulip), red peppers and paprika, red cards (hearts and diamonds), red traffic lights, red light district, red stripes on a flag, etc.

Expressions where "red" typically translates to vörös: red army, red wine, red carpet (for receiving important guests), red hair / beard, red lion (as a mythical animal), the Red Cross, The Red and the Black, the Red Sea, redshift, red giant, red blood cells, red oak, some red flowers (those with a "passionate" property, e.g. rose), red fox, names of ferric and other red minerals, red copper, rust, red phosphorus, the colour of blushing with anger or shame, etc.


Kinship terms

In Hungarian there exist separate words for brothers and sisters depending on relative age:

younger elder unspecified
relative age
brother öcs báty fivér or
fiútestvér
sister húg nővér nővér or
lánytestvér
unspecified
gender - - testvér

(There existed a separate word for "elder sister", néne, but it has become obsolete and has been replaced by the generic word for "sister".)


Writing system

The oldest surviving words written in Hungarian, from the founding declaration of the Benedictine Abbey of Tihany, 1055.

Medieval Hungarian book (a copy of the Hussite Bible), 1466Before the year 1000, Hungarians had a different writing system. When Stephen I of Hungary established the Kingdom of Hungary, the old system was gradually discarded. However, although not used at all in everyday life, it is still known and practiced by some enthusiasts.

Hungarian is written using an expanded Latin alphabet, and has a phonemic orthography, i.e. pronunciation can generally be predicted from the written language. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several modified Latin characters to represent the additional wovel sounds of the language. These include letters with acute accents (á,é,í,ó,ú) to represent long vowels, and umlauts (ö and ü) and their long counterparts ő and ű to represent front wovels. Sometimes (usually as a result of a technical glitch on a computer) ô or õ is used for ő and û for ű. This is often due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 code page. These letters are not part of the Hungarian language, and are considered misprints. Hungarian can be properly represented with the Latin-2 / ISO-8859-2 code page, but this code page is not always available. (Hungarian is the only language using both ő and ű.) Of course, Unicode includes them, and so they can be used on the Internet.

Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, with long vowels written with acutes. It also distinguishes between long and short consonants, with long consonants being doubled. For example, lenni ("to be"), hozzászólás ("comment"). The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs: <sz>+<sz>=<ssz>, e.g. művésszel ("with an artist"). But when the digraph occurs at the end of a line, all of the letters are written out.


Hungarian name

The Hungarian language uses the so-called eastern name order, in which the family name comes first and the given name comes last. However, as a rule, names are represented in the western name order when used in foreign languages. Thus for example Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist, is known in Hungary as Teller Ede. Prior to the mid-20th century, given names were usually translated along with the name order; this is no longer as common. For example, the pianist uses András Schiff when abroad, not Andrew Schiff.

In modern usage, foreign names retain their order when used in Hungarian. Pre-20th-century foreign personalities have often had their names Hungarianized even in recent times: Verne Gyula (rather than Jules Verne), Marx Károly (rather than Karl Marx) and Engels Frigyes (rather than Friedrich Engels). Other exceptional forms include Kolumbusz Kristóf (Christopher Columbus), Luther Márton (Martin Luther), Husz János (Jan Hus) and Kálvin János (John Calvin).


Controversy over origins

Mainstream linguistics holds that Hungarian is part of the Uralic family of languages, related ultimately to languages such as Finnish and Nenets.

For many years (from 1869), it was a matter of dispute whether Hungarian was a Finno-Ugric/Uralic language, or was more closely related to the Turkic languages, a controversy known as the "Ugric-Turkish war". Hungarians did absorb some Turkic influences during several centuries of co-habitation. For example, it appears that the Hungarians learned animal breeding techniques from the Turkic Chuvash, as a high proportion of words specific to agriculture and livestock are of Chuvash origin. There was also a strong Chuvash influence in burial customs. Furthermore, all Ugric languages, not just Hungarian, have Turkic loanwords related to horse riding. Nonetheless, the science of linguistics shows that the basic wordstock and morphological patterns of the Hungarian language are solidly based on a Uralic heritage.

There have been historical attempts to link Hungarian with e.g. Etruscan, Turkic, and Sumerian. Such alternative theories are usually only advocated by non-specialists today. See Pseudoscientific language comparison.

Hungarian has often been claimed to be related to Hunnish, since Hungarian legends and histories show close ties between the two peoples (although the name Hunor, preserved in legends and still used as a given name in Hungary, can also show a link with Khanty). Some people believe that the Székelys, a Hungarian ethnic group living in Romania, are descended from the Huns. However, the link with Hunnish is uncertain, and it is not even known which languages the Huns spoke.

There have been attempts, dismissed by mainstream linguists, to show that Hungarian is related to other languages including Hebrew, Egyptian, Basque, Persian, Pelasgian, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, English, Tibetan, Magar, Quechua, Armenian and at least 42 other Asian, European and even American languages.