Hungarian language
Countries (spoken in): |
Hungary and areas of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia |
Official status: |
Hungary, European Union, Slovenia (regional language), Serbia (regional language), Austria (regional language), Various localities in Romania, Some official rights in Ukraine, Croatia and Slovakia |
Total speakers: |
14.5 million speakers |
Hungarian language is a Uralic language (more specifically a Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar.
As Uralic linguists claim, Hungarian separated from its closest relatives approximately 3000 years ago, so the history of the language begins around 1000 BC. The Hungarians gradually changed their way of living from settled hunters to nomadic cattle-raising, probably as a result of early contacts with Iranian nomads.
The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible.
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.
Hungarian alphabet
Hungarian online translators
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