Hungarian (known to its speakers as magyar) is the sole official language of Hungary, spoken as a first language by roughly 9.5 million of the country's residents and by about 13 million people worldwide. It is a Uralic language — a distant relative of Finnish and Estonian — which makes it unrelated to the German, Slavic and Romance languages spoken in every country that borders it.
An island of Uralic in a sea of Indo-European
Almost every language spoken across Europe belongs to the Indo-European family — the enormous grouping that contains English, German, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Greek and Hindi alike. Hungarian does not. It belongs to the Uralic family, and this single fact explains most of what makes it unusual.
Hungary is bordered by seven countries, and a speaker of Hungarian shares no inherited vocabulary with any of their national languages. To the west and north-west lies German-speaking Austria; to the north, Slovak; to the east, Romanian; to the south and south-west, Serbian, Croatian and Slovene; to the north-east, Ukrainian. All of these are Indo-European. Hungarian sits among them like a linguistic island.
Hungarian's actual relatives are far away. Within Uralic it belongs to the Ugric branch, whose other members — Khanty and Mansi — are small languages spoken by a few thousand people in western Siberia, around the Ob River. Its better-known cousins, Finnish and Estonian, sit on a different branch of the same family. Linguists generally place the split between the ancestors of Hungarian and of the Ob-Ugric languages somewhere in the range of two to three thousand years ago, though the dating is necessarily approximate.
The historical explanation is migration. The Magyar tribes moved westward across the Eurasian steppe and settled the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century, bringing their language into the middle of a region that was otherwise Slavic and Germanic-speaking. Hungarian has stayed there ever since — and it is today by far the largest Uralic language, with more speakers than Finnish and Estonian combined.
How Hungarian actually works
Hungarian is agglutinative: rather than using prepositions and separate function words, it stacks suffixes onto a root, each one adding a defined piece of meaning. Where English needs a string of small words — "in my houses" — Hungarian builds a single word, házaimban, from ház (house) plus markers for plural, possession and location.
Cases instead of prepositions
Hungarian grammar is usually described as having around eighteen grammatical cases, though the exact count depends on where a given grammarian draws the line between a case ending and a postposition — figures from fourteen to well over twenty appear in the literature. Many of these cases express spatial relationships with a precision English handles clumsily, distinguishing motion into something, motion onto something, rest inside it, rest on its surface, and movement away from it, each with its own ending.
Vowel harmony
Suffixes are not fixed. Hungarian divides its vowels into back and front sets, and the suffix must match the vowels already in the word. The same locative ending appears as -ban in a back-vowel word and -ben in a front-vowel one. Vowel harmony is a hallmark of Uralic and Turkic languages, and it is one of the features that gives spoken Hungarian its distinctive internal rhyme.
Features that surprise English speakers
- No grammatical gender. Hungarian has a single third-person pronoun, ő, covering "he" and "she" alike. Nouns carry no gender either.
- Definite and indefinite conjugation. Verbs are conjugated differently depending on whether their object is definite, so látok ("I see something") and látom ("I see it") use distinct endings.
- Fixed stress. Word stress always falls on the first syllable, without exception — a rare piece of genuine simplicity.
- Family name first. Hungarian places the surname before the given name, the reverse of the general European order.
Vocabulary, loanwords and the written language
Although Hungarian's grammar and core vocabulary are Uralic, centuries of contact left heavy deposits of loanwords. Turkic languages contributed early terms connected with animal husbandry and settled agriculture, absorbed during the Magyars' time on the steppe. Slavic languages supplied a large layer relating to farming, Christianity and administration after the settlement of the Carpathian Basin. German added craft, urban and military vocabulary during the Habsburg centuries, and Latin remained the language of Hungarian public administration remarkably late, into the early nineteenth century.
That Latin dominance provoked a reaction. The nyelvújítás, or language reform movement, ran through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under the leadership of writers such as Ferenc Kazinczy. Its participants deliberately coined thousands of new Hungarian words from native roots to replace Latin and German borrowings, so that Hungarian could function as a modern literary and scientific language. A significant share of everyday modern vocabulary dates from this consciously engineered period.
The writing system
Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet, but an expanded version of it. The standard alphabet is usually counted as 44 letters, because digraphs such as cs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty and zs — plus the trigraph dzs — are treated as single letters with their own place in alphabetical order.
Vowel length is marked with accents, and Hungarian uses a diacritic seen in almost no other language: the double acute, in ő and ű, marking the long counterparts of ö and ü. Length is meaningful, not decorative — changing a short vowel to a long one changes the word.
The compensation for all this complexity is that Hungarian spelling is highly regular. Once the letter values are learned, pronunciation follows from the spelling with very few surprises, which is more than can be said for English or French.
Hungarian compared with Finnish, its most famous relative
The relationship between Hungarian and Finnish is frequently mentioned and almost as frequently misunderstood. They are genuinely related, but the comparison is worth making carefully, because the practical consequences of that relationship are smaller than people assume.
What they share. Both are agglutinative, building long words from stacked suffixes. Both use extensive case systems in place of prepositions. Both have vowel harmony. Neither has grammatical gender, and neither has a verb "to have" of the English type — possession is expressed with a construction closer to "there is X to me." Both fix word stress on the first syllable. A handful of core words are visibly cognate, particularly in basic vocabulary such as numerals, body parts and kinship terms.
What they do not share. Hungarian and Finnish are not mutually intelligible in any degree. A Hungarian speaker hearing Finnish understands essentially nothing, and the reverse is equally true. The two languages separated thousands of years ago and then developed in complete isolation from one another, absorbing entirely different loanword layers — Turkic, Slavic and German for Hungarian; Germanic, Baltic and Swedish for Finnish. Their sound systems have drifted far apart, and even the cognate words are often unrecognisable without training.
A reasonable analogy is the relationship between English and Persian. Both are Indo-European, and a linguist can trace the connection through systematic sound correspondences, but no English speaker can read Persian on that basis. Hungarian and Finnish are related in the same technical, historical sense — a shared family tree rather than a shared present.
Minority languages and Hungarian beyond the borders
Hungary is linguistically homogeneous by European standards; the overwhelming majority of residents speak Hungarian as a first language. The state nonetheless formally recognises the languages of thirteen national minorities, among them German, Romani, Slovak, Croatian, Romanian, Serbian and Slovene, with associated rights in education and local administration. German and Romani have the largest communities of speakers.
The more consequential fact runs in the other direction. Substantial Hungarian-speaking populations live outside Hungary, a direct legacy of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which redrew the country's borders after the First World War and left roughly a third of Hungarian speakers on the far side of them. The largest such community is in Romania, particularly in Transylvania and the Székely Land, numbering over a million. Others live in southern Slovakia, the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia, the Zakarpattia region of western Ukraine, Austria's Burgenland, and border areas of Croatia and Slovenia. Hungarian holds some form of official or co-official status in a number of these localities.
Speaking Hungarian as a visitor
Hungarian has a formidable reputation among language learners, and the difficulty is real, though sometimes overstated. English speakers gain almost no free vocabulary, and the case and conjugation systems demand sustained study. What learners get in return is consistency: the spelling is phonetic, the stress is invariable, and the exceptions are far fewer than in most Indo-European languages.
In practice, visitors manage comfortably. English is widely spoken in Budapest and in tourist areas along the Danube and around Lake Balaton, especially among younger Hungarians, for whom it has replaced Russian as the dominant foreign language taught in schools. German remains widely understood, particularly among older people and in the west of the country near the Austrian border. Outside the capital and the main tourist routes, English becomes noticeably less common, and a few learned phrases go a long way.
A handful of essentials: jó napot (good day), szia (hi, informal), köszönöm (thank you), igen (yes), nem (no), kérem (please), and beszél angolul? (do you speak English?). Hungarians are, by widespread report, disproportionately pleased when foreigners attempt any of it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hungarian related to Russian or German?
No. Russian is Slavic and German is Germanic; both are Indo-European. Hungarian is Uralic and shares no common ancestor with either. It has borrowed many words from both, but borrowing is not relatedness.
Is Hungarian the hardest language in the world?
It is regularly placed in the hardest category for English speakers by institutions that rank language difficulty, alongside languages such as Finnish, Turkish and Korean. It is not, however, in the very hardest tier, which is generally reserved for Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. The difficulty comes from unfamiliarity rather than irregularity.
How many people speak Hungarian?
Roughly 13 million worldwide. About 9.5 million are in Hungary itself, with most of the remainder in neighbouring countries — chiefly Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine — and in diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Germany and Israel.
Can I get by in Hungary with only English?
In Budapest and major tourist destinations, yes. In smaller towns and rural areas, expect gaps. Learning the alphabet's sound values is worthwhile even for a short trip, since Hungarian spelling is regular enough that place names and menus become readable quickly.
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