Hanglejtése

Hanglejtése is the Hungarian term for intonation, the pattern of pitch changes that shapes spoken language. It describes how the voice rises and falls across utterances, phrases, and words in order to convey sentence modality, focus, attitude, and discourse relations. As a component of prosody, hanglejtése works alongside rhythm, tempo, and stress to organize meaning beyond the lexical content.

In Hungarian, intonation commonly signals sentence type and focus. Declarative statements typically end with a falling contour, which marks finality. Yes–no questions often feature a rising final pitch, indicating openness to confirmation. Open-ended or wh-questions can vary in their final contour depending on context and emphasis, but they frequently show a distinct nucleus on the focused word or a marked rise on the targeted position. Contrastive focus tends to raise the pitch on the focused element, creating a prominent peak that draws attention to the new information.

Hanglejtése interacts with other phonological features of Hungarian. The language has fixed primary stress on the first syllable of a word, and there is no lexical tone; prosody rather than tone carries information structure and discourse function. Intonation patterns can change with speech rate, formality, dialect, and individual style, leading to regional and register differences.

For analysis, linguists describe Hungarian intonation using various frameworks, often employing ToBI- or autosegmental-metrical-inspired schemes to annotate pitch accents and boundary tones. These tools help compare patterns across speakers and contexts and support documentation of regional variations.