What Language Do They Speak In Hungary

What Language Do Hungarians Speak?

There are many multilinguistic nations in the world. Not every country has an official or national language. Diverse nations can also have national unity. But the state has to make an attempt to find ideas and things to unite the nation. The Hungarian people don’t have this problem, as nearly everyone in the country speaks the same vernacular. Hungarians are the biggest ethnic group in the country and makeup 98.3% of the population.

The official language of Hungary is Hungarian. Ninety-nine percent of the country’s population speaks it as their native language. When it comes to foreign languages, German and English are the most popular in Hungary. They are spoken by 11.2% and 16% of the population respectively. Various minority languages are also spoken in the country and have been recognized in the constitution as well. They are Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Romanian, Ukrainian, etc. However, the majority of the population is monolingual.

The Hungarian Language

Hungarian is a member of the Uralic family. It has 13 million native speakers. Speakers of Hungarian can be found in different European countries including Austria, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovakia. The Hungarian diaspora in the United States and Canada also speak their native tongue at home. The Hungarian alphabet has been derived from the Latin script. There are nine main Hungarian dialects, and they are all mutually intelligible. The standard variety is based on the dialect of Budapest, Hungary’s capital city.

Unlike English speakers, Hungarian speakers follow a four-tiered system for expressing politeness level. However, the four-tiered system is slowly becoming less popular. As a member of the Uralic language family, Hungarian shares word roots with Finnish and Estonian. There are also words of German and Slavic origin in Hungarian. English language speakers like “coach” and “paprika.” Hungarian has also borrowed a few loanwords from English. But overall, Hungarian has not been influenced by English as much as Indo-European languages have.

The unique vocabulary of Hungarian has made it popular. There are many words in the Hungarian language that don’t have a counterpart in English. Thanks to the internet, they have become popular in other countries too. You can see these words on the social media profiles of people. Due to the lack of popularity of English in Hungary, you will mostly see Hungarian written outside of shops. In all the small towns and cities, it is the common language of people.