Language

The Hungarian language ranks 40th among world languages with regards to the number of those who speak it as a mother tongue, and 12th among European languages, while it rates 11th among the official tongues of European countries. In numerical terms, Hungarian falls around the middle, after the larger languages; however, it is interesting to note that in 1996, Hungarian was taught at 84 universities in 32 countries. The Hungarian language belongs to those with a long-standing literary background. Its first linguistic record — in actual fact, the first known written text to include aspects of the Hungarian tongue — is the Tihany Deed of Endowment originating from 1055, while its first coherent linguistic record is to be found in the Funeral Oration written at the end of the 12th century. In this respect, there are only 15 to 20 European and Asian languages spoken today which can claim to be older than the Hungarian language. Linguists place the Hungarian language in the Uralic language family, and in particular, within the largest branch, Finno-Ugric. As a language it can be considered to have had an independent existence for the past 3,000 years. The Finno-Ugric branch is usually sub-divided into the Finnish-Permian and Ugric branches. Languages of the Finnish-Permian branch still spoken today include Finnish, Estonian, Lapp, Mordvin, Votiak (Udmurt), Zyrien (Komi), and Ceremis (Mari). The Ugric branch includes Hungarian, Vogul (Mansi) and Ostiak (Chanti). Among Uralic languages, Hungarian is the most predominant, spoken today as a mother tongue by about 15 million people. The number of people speaking all other Uralic languages is less than the number of Hungarian speakers. During its history, the Hungarian language came into frequent and occasionally long periods of contact with various Turkish languages, and with reference to similarities in vocabulary and to structural parallels, the theory is frequently advanced that Hungarian is related to Turkish.

There are no phonemes or structural characteristics in the Hungarian language which do not exist in other languages; the difference lies only in their total make-up. One of the key characteristic aspects of Hungarian phonetic structure is that there are no blurred sounds, leaving a sharp contrast of short and long vowels which create a type of metered poetry. The consonant system is fairly rich and well-structured, while the rate of use of vowels and consonants is considered pleasant to the ear — on average, there are 100 vowels to every 142 consonants.

Moving on to vocabulary, the Hungarian language is a ‘motivated’ language with a clear vocabulary, and as such, words are easily recognizable for the speaker even today, while suffixed and compound words can easily be broken down into their constituent parts. The total Hungarian vocabulary is estimated to be between 800,000 and 1,065,000 words; the number of nouns and commonly used words today amounts to several hundred thousand. The Hungarian Dictionary (Magyar Értelmezô Szótár) in standard use contains 70,000 entries.

At the beginning of words, the original Hungarian language tolerated only one consonant, and therefore — at the start of loan words — it always resolved around consonant clusters. (For instance, the word ‘schola’ in Latin was changed to ‘iskola’ in Hungarian.) As a direct consequence, the stress is always on the first syllable, giving an accented metered rhythm. (Two kinds of versification are thus possible in Hungarian, another unique characteristic of the language.)

From a typological point of view, Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means that it expresses grammatical relationships first and foremost through suffixes and prefixes. Words are often formed with suffixes, thus making it possible in one sentence to render an endless number of relationships and semantic subtleties with simple means. Computer analysis has shown that Hungarian has some 27 billion inflected, affixed words and word fragments.

Not only can relationships of place and time be denoted with verbal prefixes, but also, the very meaning of verbs can be modified. It is precisely this use of verbal prefixes which has largely contributed to the fact that from a language using a complicated tense system, Hungarian has become a language with a simple tense system. Hungarian has two verb conjugations — definite and indefinite — which in English or German can only be expressed using three words. The Hungarian ‘látom’ is equivalent to the English expression ‘I see it’. Similarly, the Hungarian ‘látok’ translates as the three word English expression ‘I see something’. And as a special feature of the language, in Hungarian one can also refer to an object in the second person — the Hungarian ‘látlak’ is equivalent to ‘I see you’.

In addition to this, the definite character of the language can be further strengthened by the use of the definite article and possessive attributes. Besides these aspects, the Hungarian language is characterized by a richness of substantives and postpositions.

Before the Conquest, Hungarian employed runic forms of writing, developed from Turkic runes, which themselves came from Phoenician. With the foundation of the Hungarian state, Latin letters gained ground, while runic writing lived on among the Szeklers until the 17th century. The Latin forms, however, had to be complemented with a whole group of individual letters, since the sound system of the Hungarian language, with its Uralic origins, differed fundamentally from the Latin language, of Indo-European origin. Today’s Hungarian language applies a 40-letter alphabet for the 39 speech sounds used in everyday language, retaining the two different letters j and ly for the sound j (in English, pronounced yei). The letters q, w, x, y, which occur only in foreign words, do not belong to the Hungarian alphabet in the strict sense of the word. However, together with them, the complete Hungarian alphabet is as follows:
A Á B C CS D DZ DZS E É F G GY H I Í J K L LY M N NY O Ó Ö Ô P Q R S SZ T TY U Ú Ü U V W X Y Z ZS.