We are often asked about the origin and nature of the Hungarian language. Hungarian is not related to English, Latin, Greek, German or Russian, which are all part of the Indo-European family of languages. Hungarian is part of the ancient Finno-Ugric language group, meaning that it is a distant relative of Finnish, Lapp and Estonian. Spoken Finnish sounds something like Hungarian, but when I hear it, I cannot recognize any of the words.

Hungarian is an agglutinative language, meaning that it “glues” prefixes, infixes and suffixes together to form words. English and Chinese are isolating languages. They use mostly word order to indicate how a word is used in a sentence, rather than endings. Inflective languages, like German and Russian, use suffixes to indicate the role of the word, but not nearly to the extent that Hungarian does. English is much closer to Chinese grammatically that it is to Hungarian.

The local university tells us that Hungarian is the third most difficult major language for native English speakers to learn. The pages below introduce you to some features of the language.