Languages
Native
Hungarian
98%
Secondary languages
English
20%
German
11%
Language Samples
Helló, hogy vagy?
Hello, how are you?
Jól vagyok, köszönöm.
I am well, thank you.
Egy, kettő, három, négy, öt, hat, hét, nyolc, kilenc, tíz.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Hungarian (Magyar) is a Uralic language of the Ugric branch, most closely related to the Ob-Ugric languages Mansi and Khanty spoken in western Siberia. It arrived in the Carpathian Basin around 895 CE when the Magyar tribes migrated westward under Árpád. Surrounded entirely by Indo-European languages, Hungarian has remained remarkably distinct over more than 1,100 years, though it has borrowed heavily from Slavic, Turkish (during the Ottoman occupation 1541–1699), German, and Latin. Hungarian has 18 or more grammatical cases and uses vowel harmony, where vowels within a word must belong to the same harmonic class. It is spoken by roughly 13 million people in Hungary and an estimated 2.5 million more in neighbouring countries.
Similar Languages
Mansi
25%
Khanty
22%
Finnish
15%
Estonian
15%
Media
The Hungarian Parliament Building on the banks of the Danube in Budapest — one of the largest parliament buildings in the world.
Photo: Kilyann Le Hen · CC BY 4.0
Did You Know
01
Hungarian has 18 grammatical cases and uses vowel harmony, meaning the suffix added to a word changes its vowels to harmonise with those in the root.
02
Hungarian family names are written surname-first (family name before given name), a convention shared with East Asian languages but unique in Europe.
03
Despite being in the Uralic family, Hungarian shares no more than 15% lexical similarity with Finnish or Estonian due to thousands of years of separate development and heavy borrowing from Turkic, Slavic, and Germanic languages.