Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and in certain areas of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Slovenia, all territories acquired after World War I. (As Hungarians say: "Hungary is perhaps the only country which is surrounded by itself."---because on the other side of every border is a land which used to be part of Hungary.) The Hungarian name for the language is Magyar.
There are about 14.5 million speakers, of which 10 million live in Hungary.
| Hungarian (Magyar) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Hungary and 10 other countries |
| Region: | -- |
| Total speakers: | 14.5 Million |
| Ranking: | 66 |
| Genetic classification: |
Uralic Finno-Ugric |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Hungary |
| Regulated by: | -- |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | hu |
| ISO 639-2 | hun |
| SIL | HNG |
Classification
Hungarian is generally believed to a member of the Ugric languages, a sub-group of the Finno-Ugric languages, which are a branch of the Uralic languages. However, there are alternative theories about the origins of Hungarian:
- Hungarian language has been claimed to be closely related to Hunnish, as Hungarian legends and histories show the close ties between the two peoples, and both the Huns and the modern day Hunnish people (Székely) lived in Hungary. However, the link to Hunnish is uncertain.
- Some scholars believe modern Magyars are ethnic descendants of the ancient Sumerians, based primarily on linguistic studies. However, mainstream opinion holds that the Sumerian language is a language isolate with no known ties to other languages.
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 |
| Austria | 22,000 |
| Croatia | 16,500 |
| Slovenia | 9,240 |
Hungarian is also spoken in Australia, Austria, Canada, and USA.
Source:Ethnologue
Official status
Hungarian is the official language of Hungary.
Dialects
The dialects of Hungarian identified by the Ethnologue are: Alfold, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Szekely, and West Hungarian.
Sounds
Hungarian pronunciation is mostly phonetic so generally it is rather easy to pronounce written words. There are some sounds which doesn't exist in English, like [ts]' or [J\].
For a complete table of the pronunciation of the Hungarian alphabet see this article in the Hungarian Wikipedia (in Hungarian, but the table is obvious), which translates Hungarian letters to IPA and X-SAMPA characters.
For example the pronunciation of "Magyarország" (Hungary) is [mAJ\Arorsa:g] (X-SAMPA), stress on first syllable.
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 combined (as in German) and derived (with suffixes).
The passive voice is almost extinct (one can find it in old literary texts).
Many grammatical and syntactical functions, elements or constructions are based on suffixes. The mark for plural is a suffixed -k, eventually preceded by a vowel when the word ends with a consonant. Usually vowels get inserted between the word and its suffix to prevent the buildup of consonants (and prevent unpronouncable words).
Hungarian has many different cases (esetek). Most common are the Nominative case, Accusative case, Dative case; some express ___location (inside: Inessive case, on the surface: Superessive case, nearby: Adessive case); some express placement (from inside: Elative case, from the surface: Delative case, from nearby: Ablative case, to inside: Illative case, to the surface: Sublative case, to nearby: Allative case); 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 some of these cases, refer to the article on the Finnish language.
The infinitive of verbs is the radical suffixed by -ni.
Verbs
As a beginning of a more complete vocabulary (szókincs), an extract for the verb "to be" in hungarian, lenni.
Forms are presented in this order:
I, You, He/She/It, We, You, They
én, te, ő, mi, ti, ők
The polite form of Thou is either ön or maga: ön is official and distancing, maga is personal and even intimate. (There are some older forms of you like "kend" which is still used in rural areas.) (As you probably noticed, Hungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns.)
Indicative Mode
PresentTense: vagyok, vagy, van, vagyunk, vagytok, vannak
PastTense: voltam, voltál, volt, voltunk, voltatok, voltak
FutureTense: leszek, leszel, lesz, leszünk, lesztek, lesznek
Conditional Mode
PresentTense: lennék, lennél, lenne, lennénk, lennétek, lennének
ImperativeTense: legyek, legyél (or légy), legyen, legyünk, legyetek, legyenek
Vocabulary
Hungarian vocabulary contains many words borrowed from various Turkic languages, as well as a few words borrowed from the Turkish language, and several hundred loans from German and Slavic languages but has retained its Ugric originality. The basic vocabulary shares many words with Finnish (e.g. the numbers egy ~ yksi, kettő ~ kaksi, három ~ kolme, négy ~ neljä and víz ~ vesi "water"), so linguists classify both as Finno-Ugric languages, a subgroup of the Uralic language family.
Writing system
Hungarian is written using a variant of the Latin alphabet. Hungarian has a phonemic orthography. 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 ő (unicode Ő and ő) and ű (unicode Ű and ű). Sometimes ô or õ is used for ő and û for ű 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 ő and ű codes.) Of course Unicode includes the glyphs, and they therefore can be used on the internet.
Additionally, the letter pairs <ny>, <ty>, and <gy> represent the palatal consonants /ñ/, /kj/, and /gj/ (like the "dy" sound in British "duke" or American "would you"). Hungarian uses <s> for /S/ and <sz> for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish. <zs> is /Z/ and <cs> is /tS/. All these digraphs are considered single letters. <ly> is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like <j> (English <y>), and mostly appears in old words. More exotic letters are <dz> and <dzs> /dZ/. They are hard to find even in a longer text. Two examples are madzag; edzeni (rope; to train) and dzsungel (jungle).
All R's are trilled, like the Spanish "perro".
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: <sz>+<sz>=<ssz>. 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 phonetic.
Examples
There is a Hungarian Wikipedia at hu.wikipedia.org
- 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]
- 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]