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Language Facts:

The Hungarian language is usually classified as Finno-Ugric. It is spoken in Hungary and in certain areas of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Slovenia, all territories acquired after World War I. The Hungarian name for the language is Magyar.

There are about 14.5 million speakers, of which 10 million live in Hungary.


Classification
Hungarian is generally believed to a member of the Ugric languages, a sub-group of the Finno-Ugric languages, which are a branch of the Uralic languages.

However, there are various other alternative theories about the origins of Hungarian, but they are usually discarded by most linguists, due to lack of evidence:
Hungarian language has been claimed to be closely related to Hunnish, as Hungarian legends and histories show the close ties between the two peoples, and both the Huns and the modern day Hunnish people (Sz kely) lived in Hungary. However, the link to Hunnish is uncertain.


Hungarian is also spoken in Australia, Austria, Canada, and USA.


Hungarian is the official language of Hungary.

Dialects
The dialects of Hungarian identified by the Ethnologue are: Alfold, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Szekely, and West Hungarian.


Sounds
Hungarian pronunciation is mostly phonetic. There are some sounds which don't exist in English, such as /?/.

For a complete table of the pronunciation of the Hungarian alphabet see this article in the Hungarian Wikipedia (in Hungarian, but the table is obvious), which translates Hungarian letters to IPA and X-SAMPA characters.

For example the pronunciation of ''"Magyarorsz g" (Hungary) is /m???rorsag/''', stress on first syllable.


Grammar
The order of words in a sentence is determined not by syntactic roles but rather by pragmatic, i.e. discourse-driven, factors. Words can be combined (as in German) and derived (with suffixes).

The passive voice is almost extinct (one can find it in old literary texts).

Many grammatical and syntactical functions, elements or constructions are based on suffixes. The mark for plural is a suffixed -k, eventually proceeded by a vowel when the word ends with a consonant. Usually vowels get inserted between the word and its suffix to prevent the buildup of consonants (and prevent unpronounceable words).

Hungarian has many different cases (esetek). Most common are the Nominative case, Accusative case, Dative case; some express location (inside: Inessive case, on the surface: Suppressive case, nearby: Adessive case); some express placement (from inside: Elative case, from the surface: Delative case, from nearby: Ablative case, to inside: Illative case, to the surface: Sublative case, to nearby: Allative case); some express other relations (Terminative case, Essive-formal case, Instrumental-comitative case, Translative case, Causal-final case). There are further cases of restricted use (Locative case, Essive-modal case, Distributive case, Distributive-temporal case, Sociative case). For examples of some of these cases, refer to the article on the Finnish language.

The infinitive of verbs is the radical suffixed by -ni.
Verbs
As a beginning of a more complete vocabulary (sz kincs), an extract for the verb "to be" in Hungarian, lenni.

Forms are presented in this order: I, You, He/She/It, We, You, They n, te, ?, mi, ti, ?k The polite form of Thou is either n or maga: ''

n is official and distancing, maga is personal and even intimate. (There are some older forms of you'' like "kend" which is still used in rural areas.) (As you probably noticed, Hungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns.)
= Indicative Mode
= Present Tense: vagyok, vagy, van, vagyunk, vagytok, vannak Past Tense: voltam, volt l, volt, voltunk, voltatok, voltak Future Tense: leszek, leszel, lesz, lesz nk, lesztek, lesznek
= Conditional Mode
= Present Tense: lenn k, lenn l, lenne, lenn nk, lenn tek, lenn nek Imperative Tense: legyek, legy l (or l gy), legyen, legy nk, legyetek, legyenek


Vocabulary
Hungarian vocabulary contains many words borrowed from various Turkic languages, as well as a few words borrowed from the Turkish language, and several hundred loans from German and Slavic languages but has retained its Ugric originality.

The basic vocabulary shares many basic words with Finnish (e.g. the numbers egy ~ yksi, kett? ~ kaksi, h rom ~ kolme, n gy ~ neljä and v z ~ vesi "water"), so linguists classify both as Finno-Ugric languages, a subgroup of the Uralic language family.


Writing system
Hungarian is written using a variant of the Latin alphabet. Hungarian has a phonemic orthography. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several additional letters. These include letters with acute accents ( ) which represent long vowels, the diaereses and their long counterparts ? (unicode ? and ?) and ? (unicode ? and ?). Sometimes or is used for ? and for ? due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 codepage. Hungarian can be properly represented with the Latin-2 / ISO-8859-2 codepage, but this codepage is not always available. (Hungarian is the only language using the ? and ? codes.) Of course Unicode includes the glyphs, and they therefore can be used on the internet.

Additionally, the letter pairs <ny>, <ty>, and <gy> represent the palatal consonants /ñ/, /kj/, and /gj/ (like the "dy" sound in British "duke" or American "would you").

Hungarian uses <s> for /S/ and <sz> for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish. is /Z/ and <cs> is /tS/. All these digraphs are considered single letters. is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like <j> (English <y>), and mostly appears in old words. More exotic letters are <dz> and <dzs> /dZ/. They are hard to find even in a longer text. Two examples are madzag; edzeni (rope; to train) and dzsungel (jungle).

All R's are trilled, like the Spanish "perro".

Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, where the long vowels are written with accents, and between long consonants and short consonants, where the long consonants are written double. The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs: +=. Usually a trigraph is a double digraph, but there are a few exceptions: tizennyolc "eighteen" is tizen + nyolc. There are doubling minimal pairs: tizenegyedik (eleventh) vs. tizennegyedik (fourteenth).

Primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. There is sometimes secondary stress on other syllables, especially when two words have been combined (like "viszontl sra" (see you later) pronounced "VEES-ohnt-LAH-tahsh-raw").

While it seems unusual to English speakers at first, once one learns the new orthography and pronunciations, Hungarian is nearly totally phonetic.


Examples
There is a Hungarian Wikipedia at hu.wikipedia.org
Hungarian (person, language): magyar ['mAdyAr]
hello: szia ['sia] (informal) (sounds almost exactly like American "see ya") But you only say this to people that you know well. When you address a stranger you use the more formal "good day": ''j napot (kiv nok)'' (YOnahpot)
good-bye: ''viszontl sra (formal) (see above), viszl t'' [vislAt] (semi informal)
please: ''k rem (sz pen)'' [kayrrem saypen] (This literally means "I ask (it) well". See next for a more common form of the polite request)
I would like ____, please: ''Szeretn k ____'' [seh-reht-neyk] (This example illustrates the use of the conditional tense, as a common form of a polite request)
sorry: ''bocs nat'' [BOchAnAt]
thank you: ''k m'' [kYs-Yn-Ym] (pout your lips for a kiss and say "uh")
that/this: az [Az] ez [ez]
how much?: mennyi? ['mennyee]
how much does it cost?: ''mennyibe ker l?'' ['mennyee-be keh-rool]
yes: igen ['igen]
no: nem [nem]
I don't understand: ''nem rtem'' ['nEm 'ayrtem]
I don't know: nem tudom [nem 'too-dohm]
where's the bathroom?: ''Hol van a v

?'' ['hole vAn A 'vay-tsay]
generic toast: ''eg gedre!'' [this is tough. Say it like this: EGG-ayss-shay-ged-rreh]
juice: ''gy lcsl

'' [dyu-mulch-lay]
water: ''v z'' [veez]
wine: bor [bohr]
beer: ''s r'' [shuhr]
milk: tej [tay]
Do you speak English?: ''Besz l angolul?'' ['bes-ayl 'Ahn-go-lool?]
I love you: szeretlek ['seretlek]
Help!: ''Seg g!'' [sheg-eet-shayg]


History
Main article: History of Hungary

Tradition holds that Hungary was founded by d, who led the Magyars into the Pannonian plains in the 9th century. The kingdom of Hungary was established in 1000 by Saint-King Stephen the Great. Initially the history of Hungary was made in the triangle with Poland and Bohemia, with the many liaisons with Popes and Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire.

Gradually Hungary turned into a big, independent kingdom that formed a tolerant Central European culture, as a part of European civilization. The Hungarian culture influenced others, i.e. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The golden age ended with the Ottoman conquest at the beginning of the 16th century, when the rest of Hungary came under Austrian control in the 16th century, with Austria conquering all of Hungary by the end of the 17th century.

Under the Austrian Habsburg dynasty Hungary would eventually, in 1867, become an autonomous part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until its collapse following World War I. Hungary declared its full independence on October 31, 1918, though it lost most of its former territory and population (mostly non-Hungarian nationals)to neighboring nations. After the failures of the new government under Mih ly K rolyi, Hungary was invaded by Romania and Budapest occupied in 1919. Soon after, there was a communist revolution, which failed after three months. During this state of anarchy, Admiral Mikl s Horthy was persuaded to take power. Over a decade later, Horthy made a limited alliance with Nazi Germany in the 1930s in order to revise the Treaty of Trianon. Hungary was rewarded by Germany with territories belonging to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania and took an active part in World War II. However, in October 1944, Hitler had to replace Horthy with a Hungarian Nazi collaborator in order to avoid Hungary defection.

Following the fall of Hitler, Hungary once again was run by communists. In 1956, a revolt and announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were met with a military intervention by the Soviet Union and led to the deposition and execution of prime minister Imre Nagy. In the late 1980s, Hungary led the movement to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and shifted toward multiparty democracy and a market-oriented economy. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Hungary developed closer ties with Western Europe, joined NATO in 1999 and joined the European Union on May 1, 2004.