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

{| border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" align="right" width="300" ! colspan="2" bgcolor="#DDDDDD" style="font-size:120%"|Hungarian (Magyar) |- | valign="top"|Spoken in: |Hungary and 10 other countries |- | valign="top"|Region: | -- |- | valign="top"|Total speakers: |14.5 Million |- | valign="top"|Ranking: |66 |- | valign="top"|Genetic
classification: |Uralic
 Finno-Ugric
  Ugric
   Hungarian |- ! colspan="2" bgcolor="#DDDDDD"|Official status |- | valign="top"|Official language of: | valign="top"|Hungary |- | valign="top"|Regulated by: | valign="top"| -- |- ! colspan="2" bgcolor="#DDDDDD"|Language codes |- |ISO 639-1||hu |- |ISO 639-2||hun |- |SIL||HNG |}

Classification

• 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 (Székely) lived in Hungary. However, the link to Hunnish is uncertain.

• Some scholars believe modern Magyars are ethnic descendants of the ancient Sumerians, based primarily on linguistic studies. However, mainstream opinion holds that the Sumerian language is a language isolate with no ties to other regional languages.

{| !Country!!Speakers |- |Hungary||align="right"|10,298,820 |- |Romania
(mainly Transylvania)||align="right"|1,700,000–3,000,000 |- |Slovakia||align="right"|597,400 |- |Yugoslavia||align="right"|450,500 |- |Ukraine||align="right"|187,000 |- |Israel||align="right"|70,000 |- |Austria||align="right"|22,000 |- |Slovenia||align="right"|9,240 |}

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

Source:Ethnologue

Official status

Dialects

Sounds

Grammar

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 preceded 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 unpronouncable words).

Hungarian has many different cases (esetek), most common are the Nominative case, Accusative case, Dative case, Instrumental case, Final case, Supressive case, Inessive case, Elative case, Terminative case, and Delative case. There is also a Formal case and a few other ones. 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 (szókincs), an extract for the verb "to be" in hungarian, lenni.

Forms are presented in this order:

I, You, He/She/It, We, You, They

én, te, ő, mi, ti, ők

The polite form of Thou is either ön or maga. (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

Conditional Mode

Vocabulary

Writing system

Additionally, the letter pairs , , and represent the palatal consonants /ñ/, /k^j/, and /g^j/ (like the "dy" sound in British "duke" or American "would you"). Hungarian uses for /S/ and for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish. is /Z/ and is /tS/. All these digraphs are considered single letters. is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like (English ), and mostly appears in old words. More exotic letters are and /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 "viszontlátásra" (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