Hungarian

Where it’s spoken

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and is also spoken by sizeable minorities in Romania (Transylvania), Slovakia, Serbia (Vojvodina), and Ukraine (Carpathian Ruthenia) — a legacy of the post-WWI Treaty of Trianon that partitioned the Hungarian-speaking lands of Austria-Hungary. Diaspora communities live in the United States, Canada, and Israel.

What it sounds like

Hungarian features vowel harmony like Turkish — suffixes select front or back vowels to match the root. It distinguishes seven vowel pairs by length. Stress falls invariably on the first syllable. Long consonants are phonemic (tol “push” vs. toll “feather/pen”).

How it’s written

Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet with acute accents marking long vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú) and double acute on long ö, ü (ő, ű). Digraphs and trigraphs (cs, ny, sz, zs, dzs) represent additional consonants. Spelling has been highly phonemic since reforms by the 19th-century Academy.

History

Magyars migrated to the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century, bringing their Finno-Ugric language. The closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, spoken in western Siberia. Modern literary Hungarian emerged during the late-18th-century language reform.