The Hungarian Language

Hungarian is spoken by roughly 14.5 million people worldwide, the majority of which live in Hungary, where it is the official language.1 Large populations of Hungarian speakers also live in Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia; smaller, but also significant numbers of speakers can be found in Ukraine and Israel.



According to Omniglot, "Hungarian is a highly inflected language in which nouns can have up to 238 possible forms."2 Hungarian stands out among the languages spoken in Central and Eastern Europe, because it is not of Germanic, Romanic or Slavic origin; rather, it comes from the Uralic family of languages to which Finnish and Estonian belong, and is actually closest to Mansi and Khanty, which are spoken in Western Siberia. With Hungary surrounded by countries speaking non-Uralic languages, Hungarian has naturally absorbed a great deal of foreign loan words. These loan words are from languages such as Iranian, Turkic, Caucasian, Slavic, Latin and German.3

Below are some brief but important facts about the larger markets within the Hungarian-speaking world:

Capital: Budapest
Currency: Forint (HUF)
Government Type: Parliamentary democracy
Population: 10,032,375 (July 2004 est.)
Internet Country Code: .hu
Internet Hosts: 383,071 (2004)
Internet Users: 1.6 million (2002)

For additional demographic information on the countries listed here, you can check out the following link:

http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/hu.html

For information on The Hungarian Writing System, please see our Quick Facts Library.

1 "HUNGARIAN: a language of Hungary" Ethnologue.com
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=HNG
[Accessed December 9, 2004]

2 "Hungarian (Magyar)" Omniglot: A Guide to Writing Systems
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hungarian.htm
[Accessed December 9, 2004]

3 "Hungarian language" Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9041547
[Accessed December 8, 2004]