Hungarian language

Hungarian (magyar nyelv) is a Uralic language, more specifically a Ugric language, mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries. There are about 14.5 million native speakers, of whom 9.5–10 million live in Hungary. Another two million speakers live outside Hungary. Of these, the largest group lives in Romania, where there are approximately 1.4 million Hungarians. Hungarian-speaking people are also found in Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia, as well as about a million people in other parts of the world.

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and an official language of the European Union. It is also an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia. It is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria, Croatia, Romania, Bukovina, Ukraine, and Slovakia.

The dialects of Hungarian are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely, West Hungarian, and Csángó. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Csángó minority group has been largely isolated from other Hungarians, and they therefore preserved a dialect closely resembling medieval Hungarian.

Hungarian is considered to have separated from its closest relatives approximately 3000 years ago, so the history of the language begins around 1000 BC. There are no written resources on the era, thus only a little is known about it. However, research has revealed some very early loanwords.

The Turkic languages, especially between the 5th and the 9th centuries, had a great influence on the language. The Hungarians migrated to the Carpathian Basin around 896 and came into contact with Slavic peoples as well as with speakers of Romance languages, borrowing many words from them. The neighbouring Slavic languages also contain some words of Hungarian origin.

The first written accounts of Hungarian date back to the 10th century. Hungarians also had their own writing system, the Old Hungarian script, but no significant texts remained from the time due as Stephen I of Hungary gave an order to burn the written sticks. The first printed Hungarian book, "Az Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven" (The letters of Saint Paul in the Hungarian language), was published in 1533 by Benedek Komjáti. In the 17th century, the language was already very similar to its current form. German, Italian, and French loans also appeared in the language by these years. Further Turkish words were borrowed during the Ottoman occupation of much of Hungary between 1541 and 1699.

The language reform movement in the 18th century produced more than ten thousand words, many of which are used actively today. The reforms led to the establishment of Hungarian as the official language in Hungary in 1844. The 19th and 20th centuries saw further standardization of the language.

Hungarian is an agglutinative language – it uses a number of different affixes, including suffixes, prefixes and a circumfix to define the meaning or the grammatical function. Instead of prepositions, which are common in English, Hungarian uses only postpositions.

There are two types of article in Hungarian: definite and indefinite. Nouns have as many as eighteen cases. Plurals are formed using the suffix "–k".

Adjectives precede nouns. They have three degrees, including base, comparative, and superlative. If the noun takes the plural or a case, the adjective, used attributively, does not agree with it. However, when the adjective is used in a predicative sense, it must agree with the noun. Adjectives also take cases when they are used without nouns.

Every Hungarian verb has two conjugations (definite and indefinite), two tenses (past and present-future), and three moods (indicative, conditional, and imperative), two numbers (singular or plural), and three persons (first, second, and third). Out of these features, the two different conjugations are the most characteristic: the definite conjugation is used for a transitive verb with a definite object and the indefinite conjugation is used for an intransitive verb or for a transitive verb with an indefinite object, although these rules do not apply everywhere.

Hungarian word order, often mentioned as free, is more semantical than syntactical. This feature makes Hungarian able to focus on particular sections of the sentence – generally, the word before the verb contains the most important information.

Modern Hungarian is written using an expanded Latin alphabet, and has a phonemic orthography. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several modified Latin characters to represent the additional vowel sounds of the language. These include letters with acute accents (á,é,í,ó,ú) to represent long vowels, and umlauts (ö and ü) and their long counterparts ő and ű to represent front vowels. Hungarian also distinguishes between long and short consonants, with long consonants being doubled.

Information: Wikipedia