Ungarisch

Ungarisch, in English often called Hungarian, is a Uralic language spoken primarily in Hungary. In its own tongue the language is Magyar. It is the official language of Hungary and is widely used by minority communities in neighboring countries such as Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine, as well as in diaspora communities around the world. Estimates place native speakers at around 13 million, with many more using it as a second language.

Ungarisch belongs to the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family. It is written with a Latin-based alphabet that includes diacritics and several digraphs treated as single letters, such as cs, dz, and dzs. Orthography marks vowel length and frontness (for example á, é, ő, ű), and features 14 distinct vowels. The language exhibits vowel harmony, whereby suffix vowels adjust to the stem vowels.

Grammatically, Ungarisch is highly agglutinative and uses extensive suffixation to encode tense, mood, case, number, possession, and other grammatical relations. It has a rich case system—often described as around 18 cases—and no grammatical gender. The verb system encodes person, number, tense, mood, aspect, and definiteness, with substantial use of definite and indefinite conjugations.

Standard Hungarian (Magyar) is the written standard that coexists with regional dialects. The language has a long literary history and has been influenced by neighboring languages, including Turkish, German, and Slavic languages. In many countries, Ungarisch is taught in schools and used in media, government, and daily communication; in Hungary, it remains the primary language of public life.