The world language from the land of the magyar

Welcome! – Or as they say in Hungary: Üdvözöljük!

Hungarian, together with Estonian, Sami and Finnish, belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages, a branch of the Uralic language family. It has no closer connection to the Indo-Germanic languages spoken in Europe and is therefore very different from other languages spoken in Central and Southern Europe. The Hungarian language is the native language of about 14 million people. 

Like Finnish, Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means that words in Hungarian are defined more precisely (e.g. according to preposition, pronoun or plural) by adding different endings. There is another common feature with Finnish regarding pronunciation: Also in Hungarian words are usually pronounced as they are written and the emphasis is always on the first syllable.

The Hungarian alphabet consists of 44 characters:

A a, Á á, B b, C c, 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, Q q, R r, S s, Sz sz, T t, Ty ty, U u, Ú ú, Ü ü, Ű ű, V v, W w, X x, Y y, Z z, Zs zs.

Hungarian, together with languages such as Mandarin, Arabic, Russian or Japanese, is considered a very difficult language to learn. One reason may be that Hungarian is so completely different from the languages that sound familiar to most Europeans. On the other hand, it may be due to the grammar, which seems very complicated for many non-Hungarians. It is questionable, for example, how many cases actually exist in Hungarian. Depending on the source, there is a wide range of information on this, from five to forty cases.