Hungarian: why it sounds like nothing else in Europe

The first thing most visitors notice about Hungarian is that they cannot guess a single word of it.

That reaction is correct and it has a reason. Hungarian is not an Indo-European language. It is not related to German, or to the Slavic languages that surround it, or to Romanian next door, or to Latin. Its nearest linguistic relatives are Finnish and Estonian, spoken around the Baltic, and even those are distant enough that a Hungarian and a Finn share no useful mutual vocabulary at all.

The family is called Uralic, and the split is old — deep enough that the shared inheritance is grammatical structure rather than words you would recognise.

How it got here

The Magyar tribes arrived in the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century, coming from the east, and brought the language with them. Everything around it was and remained something else: German to the west, Slavic to the north and south, Romanian to the east.

Eleven hundred years later the language is still an island. It has borrowed heavily — Turkish words from the Ottoman period, German from the Habsburgs, Slavic from the neighbours, and English recently — but the structure never assimilated.

That structure is the interesting part.

What makes it hard, precisely

It is agglutinative. Where English uses prepositions and separate words, Hungarian stacks suffixes onto a stem. *Ház* is house. *Házam* is my house. *Házamban* is in my house. *Házaimban* is in my houses. Grammatical information that English spreads across four words arrives as one.

It has around eighteen cases, depending on how you count, where German has four and English has effectively none.

Vowel harmony. Suffixes change their vowels to match the word they attach to, so the same grammatical ending has front and back versions — which is a large part of why the language has its particular rhythm.

Word order is driven by emphasis rather than by grammar. The subject-verb-object rule you expect does not hold; what sits before the verb is what is being stressed.

There is no grammatical gender at all, and one pronoun — *ő* — covers he and she. This is the one place Hungarian is dramatically simpler than its neighbours.

What you actually need

Practically nothing. English is widely spoken in central Budapest, in every hotel, in almost every restaurant a visitor will use, and by essentially everyone under forty in the hospitality trade. German is common too, particularly with older people.

Outside the centre — in Kőbánya, Rákosmente, an ordinary market — that thins out noticeably, and a few words go a long way.

The short list, with rough pronunciation:

• Szia (SEE-ya) — hi / bye, informal
• Jó napot (yo NA-pot) — good day, the polite greeting
• Köszönöm (KUH-suh-nuhm) — thank you
• Kérek (KAY-rek) — I would like
• Igen / Nem (EE-gen / nem) — yes / no
• Elnézést (EL-nay-zaysht) — excuse me
• Egészségedre (EG-aysh-shay-ged-re) — cheers, and a genuine test of nerve
• Nem beszélek magyarul — I do not speak Hungarian
• A számlát, legyen szíves — the bill, please
• Viszlát (VEES-lat) — goodbye

Reading signs, which is more useful than speaking

A handful of endings and words unlock most of what is written on a street:

• -utca — street. -út — road or avenue. -tér — square. -körút — boulevard. -híd — bridge. -sziget — island. -hegy — hill.
• fürdő — bath, as in the thermal baths
• kert — garden, which is where the *ruin bar* names come from: Szimpla Kert, Ellátó Kert
• ház — house. vár — castle. templom — church. piac — market. pályaudvar — railway terminus
• nyitva — open. zárva — closed. bejárat — entrance. kijárat — exit

Knowing that *utca* means street is the difference between reading an address and guessing at one.

Names, and why they look backwards

Hungarian puts the family name first. The composer you know as Franz Liszt is Liszt Ferenc in Hungarian, and Béla Bartók is Bartók Béla. Street names follow: Andrássy Avenue is named after Count Gyula Andrássy, Vörösmarty Square after the poet Mihály Vörösmarty, and Kós Károly tér after the architect Károly Kós.

The same reversal applies to the Széchenyi Chain Bridge and the Széchenyi Baths — both named for Széchenyi István, and neither for the other.

This trips people up constantly when searching for a Hungarian name online.

The accents matter

*á* is not *a*, and *ö* is not *o*. They are different letters representing different sounds, and swapping them changes words. The long vowels — á é í ó ő ú ű — are genuinely long, and the double acute on *ő* and *ű* exists in almost no other language.

For finding places, this matters practically: search engines usually cope, but typing *Erzsebetvaros* for *Erzsébetváros* will sometimes fail.

What it sounds like

Stress falls on the first syllable of every word, without exception, which gives Hungarian its distinctive even, front-loaded rhythm. Once you notice it, you can identify the language across a room without understanding a word of it — which is, in the end, the most common experience visitors have of it.