2 Geographic distribution

Hungarian is spoken in the following countries:

Country	Speakers
Hungary	10,298,820
Romania (mainly Transylvania)	1,700,000 - 3,000,000 (*)
Slovakia	597,400
Serbia and Montenegro	293,000
Ukraine	187,000
Israel	70,000
Sweden	35,000
Austria	22,000
Croatia	16,500
Slovenia	9,240

(*) of whom, according to the 2002 census, 1,450,000 speak it as mother tongue.

Source: Ethnologue

Hungarian speakers are also found in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States and at other parts of the world, in number altogether about a million people.

2.1 Official status

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the EU.

2.2 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.

3 Phonology

main article: Hungarian phonology

There are some sounds which do not exist in English, such as /ɟ/. For example the pronunciation of "Magyarország" (Hungary) is /mɑɟɑrorsaːg/, with the stress on the first syllable.

4 Grammar

The order of words in a sentence is determined not by syntactic roles, but rather by pragmatic - i.e., discourse-driven - factors. Words can be compound (as in German) and derived (with suffixes).

The passive voice is almost extinct, but can be found in old literary texts.

4.1 Vowel Harmony

Vowel harmony is typical for agglutinating languages like Sumerian, Hungarian or Turkish. Vowels can be high/front (eéiíöoüu) or deep/back (aáoóuú). An ending must be the same type, as the last syllable of the word; if the word have front vowels, the ending will also be front (vér - vérek), a word with back vowels takes a back ending (ház - házak). Old Hungarian words contain typically either only front or only back vowels (malac: deep, egér: high). See in more details at Vowel harmony.

4.2 Nouns

Many grammatical and syntactic functions, elements and constructions are based on suffixes. The mark for the plural of a noun is a suffix -k, preceded by a vowel if the word ends in a consonant. Usually, vowels are inserted between the word and its suffix to prevent a buildup of consonants (and hence to prevent unpronouncable words). The inserted vowels must follow the rules of vowel harmony.

Hungarian grammar uses endings to express the relation of things, which are in other languages usually called cases. For example: at the table = az asztalnál (space relation), at 5 o'clock = öt órakor (time relation). Some people debate if these relations can be called cases, arguing that this usage was only introduced by the Swedish linguist B. Collinder. This is in fact a matter of definition of "case", and the case system is widely used in contemporary grammatical description of all agglutinating languages, including Hungarian.

Most common of the cases in Hungarian are the nominative case, accusative case and dative case; some express location and placement (see the chart below); and some express other relations ( terminative case, essive-formal case, instrumental-comitative case, translative case, causal-final case). There are further cases of restricted use ( locative case, essive-modal case, distributive case, distributive-temporal case, sociative case). For examples of these cases, refer to the article List of grammatical cases.

ház - house

	interior	surface	adjacency
from	házból ( Elative case)	házról ( Delative case)	háztól ( Ablative case)
at	házban ( Inessive case)	házon ( Superessive case)	háznál ( Adessive case)
to	házba ( Illative case)	házra ( Sublative case)	házhoz ( Allative case)

Hungarian uses plural sparsely, ie. only if no quantity is marked. Plural is not used with definite or indefinite numerals. Examples: öt fiú five boys; sok fiú many boys; fiúk boys.

4.3 Verbs

4.3.1 General information

Hungarian verbs have two conjugations: a definite and an indefinite. The definite conjugation is mostly used in case of a direct and definite object. For example: várom a buszt "I am waiting for the bus", várok "I am waiting". Látok (valamit) "I can see (something)", but látom a könyvet "I can see the book".

Forms are presented in this order:

Singular			Plural
I	you (sg)	he/she/it	we	you (pl)	they
én	te	o	mi	ti	ok

These pronouns don't usually appear (since the suffix is enough in itself to mark the person), unless they are contrasted or emphasized.

Beside te and ti, which are used informally, there are polite forms for the second person pronouns: ön or maga. Ön is official and distancing, maga is personal and even intimate. (There are some older forms for you, like kend, which is still used in rural areas.) See also: T-V distinction.

Verbs with the polite 2nd person forms ön and maga take the suffixes of the 3rd person verb forms. For example te kérsz (second person, informal), but ön kér or maga kér (second person, formal), just like o kér (third person).

As you can notice, Hungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns, like e.g. Turkish.

The basic verb form for derivation is always the third person singular.

The infinitive of verbs is the radical suffixed by -ni.

4.3.2 A regular sample verb

Here is a regular verb, kér ("ask for something"). — The personal suffixes are marked in bold.

Indefinite

Definite

INDICATIVE MOOD (Present, Past, Future)

kérek

kérsz

kér

kérünk

kértek

kérnek

kérem

kéred

kéri

kérjük

kéritek

kérik

kértem

kértél

kért

kértünk

kértetek

kértek

kértem

kérted

kérte

kértük

kértétek

kérték

kérni fogok

kérni fogsz

kérni fog

kérni fogunk

kérni fogtok

kérni fognak

kérni fogom

kérni fogod

kérni fogja

kérni fogjuk

kérni fogjátok

kérni fogják

CONDITIONAL MOOD (Present, Past)

kérnék

kérnél

kérne

kérnénk

kérnétek

kérnének

kérném

kérnéd

kérné

kérnénk

kérnétek

kérnék

kértem volna

kértél volna

kért volna

kértünk volna

kértetek volna

kértek volna

kértem volna

kérted volna

kérte volna

kértük volna

kértétek volna

kérték volna

IMPERATIVE / SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD (Present)

kérjek

kérjél or kérj

kérjen

kérjünk

kérjetek

kérjenek

kérjem

kérjed or kérd

kérje

kérjük

kérjétek

kérjék

4.3.3 The substantive verb (to be)

The substantive verb "to be" in Hungarian is lenni. Like in most other languages of the world, this verb is irregular. In Hungarian it comes from three (or four) bases: vagy (or van-), vol-, and len-. — As it cannot have an object, it doesn't have definite forms.

INDICATIVE MOOD
PresentTense	vagyok	vagy	van	vagyunk	vagytok	vannak
PastTense	voltam	voltál	volt	voltunk	voltatok	voltak
FutureTense	leszek	leszel	lesz	leszünk	lesztek	lesznek
CONDITIONAL MOOD
PresentTense	lennék	lennél	lenne	lennénk	lennétek	lennének
PastTense	lettem volna	lettél volna	lett volna	lettünk volna	lettetek volna	lettek volna
IMPERATIVE / SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD
PresentTense	legyek	legyél or légy	legyen	legyünk	legyetek	legyenek

Hungarian uses the verb "to be" much less frequently than English, because it is omitted in the present tense in the third person (singular/plural), if one speaks about what something is (see copula). On the other hand, the substantive verb must be used in other tenses and other persons, and every time one speaks about where something is, or if one emphasizes the existence or availability of something. For example: Péter orvos Ø - Peter is a doctor. Péter orvos volt - Péter was a doctor. Orvos vagyok - I am a doctor. Van orvos a szobában - There is a doctor in the room.

4.3.4 Further information on verbs

Hungarian uses verbal prefixes which modify the meaning of the verbs and form separate verbs out of them. These prefixed verbs usually have meanings which are consistently build up from the basic meaning of the elements, and many of them have figurative, idiomatic meanings as well. For example: ír he writes, leír he writes down, kiír he writes out, beír he writes into etc. (basic meanings). On the other hand, leír may also mean "declare as useless" (cf. "write off"), and beír "give a written warning" (to a schoolchild).

There are also compund words using verbs which have their individual meanings, for example egyedülálló single (eg. person), whereas egyedül álló means something which stands alone.

5 Lexicon

Due to the existence of compound words, lexicon of Hungarian could be considered to contain about 1 million words, but as a matter of fact, this estimate is disputed, because in agglutinating languages is hard to define what to call "a word". Hungarian words are built around so called word bushes, for example kör-köröz-körös-kering-kerge-kurta etc. Due to this feature words with similar meaning often arise from the same root.

The lexicon of Hungarian contains words borrowed by various Turkic languages, including Turkish, as well as several loans from German and Slavic.

The basic vocabulary shares about 1000 words from Uralic languages like Finnish and Estonian (e.g., the numbers egy ~ yksi ~ üks (1), ketto ~ kaksi ~ kaks (2), három ~ kolme ~ kolm (3), négy ~ neljä ~ neli (4); víz ~ vesi (water); kéz ~ käsi (hand); vér ~ veri (blood); fej ~ pää ~ pea (head) which have systematic sound correspondences, so most linguists classify them as Finno-Ugric languages, a subgroup of the Uralic language family.

6 Writing system

Hungarian is written using a variant of the 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 additional letters. These include letters with acute accents (á,é,í,ó,ú) which represent long vowels, the diaereses ö and ü and their long counterparts o (unicode O and o) and u (unicode U and u). Sometimes ô or õ is used for o and û for u, due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 codepage. Hungarian can be properly represented with the Latin-2 / ISO-8859-2 codepage, but this codepage is not always available. (Hungarian is the only language using the o and u codes.) Of course, Unicode includes the glyphs, and they therefore can be used on the Internet.

For a complete table of the pronunciation of the Hungarian alphabet, see (in Hungarian, but the table is obvious), which transliterates Hungarian letters into IPA and X-SAMPA characters.

Additionally, the letter pairs , , and represent the palatal consonants /ñ/, /t^j/, and /d^j/ (like the "dy" sound in British "duke" or American "would you"). Hungarian uses for /S/ and for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish. is /Z/ and is /tS/. All these digraphs are considered single letters. is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like (English ), and mostly appears in old words. More exotic letters are and /dZ/. They are hard to find even in a longer text. Two examples are madzag; edzeni (rope; to train) and dzsungel (jungle).

Single R's are tapped, like the Spanish "pero"; Double R's and initial R's are trilled, like the Spanish "perro" or "romper".

Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, where the long vowels are written with accents, and between long consonants and short consonants, where the long consonants are written double. The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs: +=. Usually a trigraph is a double digraph, but there are a few exceptions: tizennyolc "eighteen" is tizen + nyolc. There are doubling minimal pairs: tizenegyedik (eleventh) vs. tizennegyedik (fourteenth).

Primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. There is sometimes secondary stress on other syllables, especially when two words have been combined (like "viszontlátásra" (see you later) pronounced "VEES-ohnt-LAH-tahsh-raw").

While it seems unusual to English speakers at first, once one learns the new orthography and pronunciations, Hungarian is nearly totally phonemically written.

7 Examples

• Hungarian (person, language): magyar ['mAdyAr]
• hello: szia ['sia] (informal) (sounds almost exactly like American "see ya") But you only say this to people that you know well. When you address a stranger you use the more formal "good day": jó napot (kivánok) (YOnahpot)
• good-bye: viszontlátásra (formal) (see above), viszlát [vislAt] (semi informal)
• please: kérem (szépen) [kayrrem saypen] (This literally means "I ask (it) well". See next for a more common form of the polite request)
• I would like ____, please: Szeretnék ____ [seh-reht-neyk] (This example illustrates the use of the conditional tense, as a common form of a polite request)
• sorry: bocsánat [BOchAnAt]
• thank you: köszönöm [kYs-Yn-Ym] (pout your lips for a kiss and say "uh")
• that/this: az [Az] ez [ez]
• how much?: mennyi? ['mennyee]
• how much does it cost?: mennyibe kerül? ['mennyee-be keh-rool]
• yes: igen ['igen]
• no: nem [nem]
• I don't understand: nem értem ['nEm 'ayrtem]
• I don't know: nem tudom [nem 'too-dohm]
• where's the bathroom?: Hol van a vécé? ['hole vAn A 'vay-tsay], more polite (and word-to-word) version Hol van a mosdó? ['hole vAn A 'mosh-daw];
• generic toast: egészségedre! [this is tough. Say it like this: EGG-ayss-shay-ged-rreh]
• juice: gyümölcslé [dyu-mulch-lay]
• water: víz [veez]
• wine: bor [bohr]
• beer: sör [shuhr]
• milk: tej [tay]
• Do you speak English?: Beszél angolul? ['bes-ayl 'Ahn-go-lool?]
• I love you: szeretlek ['seretlek]
• Help!: Segítség! [sheg-eet-shayg]

8 External links

• Hungarian - A Strange Cake on the Menu - article by Nádasdy Ádám
• Ethnologue report for Hungarian
• Numerals of some Uralic languages
• Uralic page
• Introduction to Hungarian
• Hungarian Wikipedia

8.1 Dictionaries

• Hungarian-English-Hungarian
• Hungarian-English False cognates ( False Cognates)
• Hungarian slang
• Hungarian-Japanese-Hungarian online dictionary

8.2 Online Language Courses

• Online course hungarotips.com
• Hungarian Profile
• Study Hungarian! (AFS.com)
• Hungarian Phrase Guides
• Magyaróra: New paths to the Hungarian language

8.3 More links for learners

• Course, Vocabularies, Phrases, Literature...

Finno-Ugric languages Languages of Hungary Languages of Romania Languages of Slovakia

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