Hungarian

Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family, specifically belonging to the Finno-Ugric branch. It is the official language of Hungary and is also spoken by Hungarian communities in neighboring countries such as Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, and Austria, as well as by diaspora communities worldwide. Hungarian is spoken by approximately 13 million people globally.

Hungarian is an agglutinative language, meaning that words can be formed by attaching multiple affixes to a root to convey complex meanings. This characteristic can result in long and complex words. Hungarian has a rich case system, with around 18-20 grammatical cases depending on the analysis, which allows for a highly flexible word order. The language also uses vowel harmony, a linguistic phenomenon in which certain vowels tend to co-occur within words.

The Hungarian alphabet is based on the Latin script and consists of 44 letters, including several accented vowels and digraphs (two letters representing a single sound) and trigraphs (three letters representing a single sound). Hungarian pronunciation is mostly consistent, with each letter or letter combination representing one sound.

How hard is it to learn Hungarian?

Learning Hungarian can be challenging for English speakers due to significant differences in vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. While Hungarian is a Uralic language like Finnish and Estonian, it is part of a different branch and has fewer similarities to those languages. It is not related to the neighboring Indo-European languages, such as German, Czech, or Romanian, which makes it more challenging for speakers of these languages to learn Hungarian.

Most learners from English can master the Hungarian language with around 44 weeks of study.