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13 fascinating facts about the Hungarian language
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The complexity and uniqueness make Hungarian an outstanding language in the world. Another interesting information is that there are no similar languages near Hungary. The Culture Trip collected 13 facts you may not know about Hungarian.
Itās hard to learn
Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages to learn around the globe. People rank it in the top 10 due to its 26 cases and complicated rules.
Magyar
āMagyarā means āHungarianā that can refer to the Hungarian people and the Hungarian language as well.
13 million people
Only 13 million people speak Hungarian in the entire world because Hungary is a small country. It has only about 9.8 million citizens. The reason why more people speak this unique language than the population of the country is simple. Neighbour countries of Hungary such as Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Romania have a big Hungarian population. It is because those areas were part of the former Hungarian Kingdom. Additionally, there are many people living abroad in the United States or the United Kingdom for example, who speak Hungarian.
Asian origin
If you have ever wondered why the Hungarian language is so much different than the languages surrounding Hungary, it might have come to your mind that the Hungarian origin was a little bit farther away in the past. Namely, this origin happened to be in Asia. Therefore Hungarian is Finno-Ugric, unlike its Indo-European neighbours.
14 vowels
There are 44Ā letters in the Hungarian alphabet out of which 14 are vowels. If we compare this number with 5, that is the number of the English vowels, we may get even more surprised. Hungarian has 9 variants that originate in the 5 basic vowels āa, e, i, o, and uā that are Ć”, Ć©, Ć, Ć³, ƶ, Å, Ćŗ, Ć¼, and ű. They all have different pronunciation and they can indeed make a difference in meaning. For example āfelā means āupā but āfĆ©lā means āhalfā.
Flexible word order
There are many ways to build a sentence in Hungarian regarding word order. It is quite flexible but that might be misleading. There are certain rules one has to follow when constructing a Hungarian sentence unless it will be grammatically incorrect.
I am going to use capital letters to amphesize the importance of what needs to be said about this article! PLEASE TAKE THIS PIECE OF GARBAGE OF AN ARTICLE OFF THE INTERNET! IT IS FULL OF FALSEHOODS, LIKE THE ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE, NAMELY BEING fINNO-UGRIC. That is very untrue according to the latest science! Also the HUNGARIAN ALPHABET is not 44 letters, as it is stated, It is only 42 letters. The letters DZ and DZS are NOT an official part of the language or the real Hungarian alphabet. It has also been scientifically proven by genetics that Hungarians and Szeklers (SzƩkelys) are the same people and native residents of the Carpathian basin, speaking the same language since time immamorial and that Hungarians (or HUNS) have digressed from there as nomads to the East to the Russian steppes and beyond all the way to China, (look it up in Chinese history) but the Szeklers (who speak the same (Magyar) language, stayed behind in the Carpathian basin. And when the Hungarians returned to the Carpathian basin hundreds of years later, they actually returned HOME and were greated by the Szeklers in their own MAGYAR language. For genetic proof, look for it in a year 2000 issue of the Science Magazine . The Magyar language therefore is as old or older than Chinese, Egyptian, Hebrew, Sanskrit or Tamil.