Hungarian Written Language

Hungarian spoken areas:

• Hungary (white area)

Hungarian spoken in the border regions (light blue):

• Serbia
• Romania
• Ukraine
• Slovakia

General

Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group, namely a branch of the Uralo-Altaic language family. This means, that Hungarian has absolutely nothing to do with Indo-European languages such as English, German, Spanish etc.

Spoken Hungarian

Spoken Hungarian has distinctive gimmicks such as the so-called vowel harmony. This means, that endings correspond with the syllables standing in front of the ending. It includes certain pronunciation patterns, which are difficult to learn. Slovakian - a Slavic language has something similar, although it was heavily influenced by Hungarian.

Pronunciation is completely different to the Latin alphabet that is used. Also, there are some consonant combinations counting as single sounds, eg:cs is a single letter (see the accents in the box below)

Written Hungarian

Hungarian is an agglutinative language, ie: parts of words are combined into long sequences to form sentences. Other languages belonging to the same language family (distantly!) include Finnish and Turkish.

Q, W, X and Y are not used in the Hungarian alphabet, only in loan words and foreign words.

Hungarian Latin Alphabet

There are 40 letters in the Hungarian alphabet.

It does use accents, see below:

Full Hungarian Alphabet

   a      A  

   á      Á  

   b      B  

   c      C  

   d      D  

   cs      Cs  

   d      D  

   dz      Dz  

   dzs      Dzs  

   e      E  

   é      É  

   f      F  

   g      G  

   gy      Gy  

   h      H  

   i      I  

   í      Í  

   j      J  

   k      K  

   l      L  

   ly      Ly  

   m      M  

   n      N  

   ny      Ny  

   o      O  

   ó      Ó  

   ö      Ö  

   ő      Ő  

   p      P  

   r      R  

   s      S  

   sz      Sz  

   t      T  

   ty      Ty  

   u      U  

   ú      Ú  

   ü      Ü  

   ű      Ű  

   v      V  

   z      Z  

   zs      Zs  

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