Language Diversity - Language Diversity - Map of Minorities & Regional and Minority Languages of Europe for and about linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe.

Language

Hungarian (magyar)

Description

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family. Different from most other European languages Hungarian is not an Indo-European language.

Hungarian is widely spoken in the southern-central European region by 13 to 15 million people. It is not only an official language in Hungary, but next to the state language, also official in the Serbian region of Vojvodina and in some municipalities in the Slovenian region of Prekmurje. Furthermore Hungarian is a recognised minority language in Austria, Croatia, Romania and Slovakia.

The large linguistic distance to the languages of neighbouring peoples (German, Romanian, Slovakian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian) is an important element for the Hungarian national identity. The Magyars or Hungarians are the descendants of Eurasian nomads from the steppes who came to Central Europe relatively late (6th-8th century AD) and have retained their language until the present day.

The relationship with the Uralic languages is visible mainly from the structure of the language; there are only very few similarities in the vocabulary left.

Important Words

Hello - szia

Thank you - köszönöm

Please - kérem

Cheers - egészségére

Use your tongue not just for kissing – Ne csak csókra nyisd a szád

You are not alone - NEM VAGY EGYEDÜL

Special

The system of cases in Hungarian is very complex, with 27 cases; there is no other language in Europe that distinguishes between so many case relations.

Furthermore Hungarian retained its character as an agglutinative language, which means that units with grammatic meaning are joined as affixes to a specific word, without changing the root of the word.

Language families

  1. Uralic
  2. Hungarian
  3. Hungarian

Countries (Official language)

Hungary (9.066.000 Speaker)