Hungarian FAQs

Where is Hungarian spoken?

Hungarian is spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighboring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union.

Outside Hungary, it is also spoken by communities of Hungarians in Slovakia, western Ukraine, central and western Romania, northern Serbia, northern Croatia, and northern Slovenia.

It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly the United States and Canada) and Israel.

How many people speak Hungarian?

Hungarian is spoken by approximately 13 million people. Most of them live in Hungary (around 10 million) and Romania (around 1.5 million).

There are not so many learners of Hungarian as a foreign language worldwide as it is a hard language to learn and it is not that widespread. Unfortunately, no exact data is available, but on Duolingo (a language learning app) alone there are over 300 thousand Hungarian learners.

What makes Hungarian difficult to learn?

Hungarian is considered by many to be one of the hardest foreign languages to learn.

Here are a few things that make Hungarian hard to master: a complex system of 14 unique vowels; complex verb conjugations with a large number of inflections to express various grammatical meanings; a large number of noun inflections to denote possession, prepositions, number, and other grammatical meanings; sound and vowel harmony due to which word endings can have two or three different versions applied in different conditions.

Is Hungarian a Slavic language?

Hungarian is not a Slavic language. In fact, it is not even an Indo-European language. Indo-European languages are a large family that Germanic (English, German), Romance (French, Spanish), Slavic (Russian, Polish) and other languages belong to.

Hungarian belongs to a different language family: it is a Uralic language. The Uralic languages form a family of languages spoken predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.

The name "Uralic" derives from the fact that the family's original homeland is commonly hypothesized to lie in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains. Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic.