Why us?

Hungarian

Approximately 15 million people around the world speak Hungarian. It belongs to the Uralic language family and is one of the few European languages that are not part of the Indo-European family of languages. Hungarian is also one of the official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary, it is spoken in the neighboring countries, such as Ukraine, Serbia, Romania and Slovakia, as well as by Hungarian communities across the world. First documents written in Hungarian began to emerge in the 13^th century AD. The language has a wide range of declensions – a single noun can get up to 238 different forms and as a result, the order of words in the sentence can vary, while the meaning remains the same.

Hungarian is considered one of the most challenging languages to learn. The 5 English vowels pale in comparison to Hungarian’s 14 – in addition to the “basic” a, e, i, o, u, Hungarian includes 9 variations: á, é, í, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü, ű. Order of words is extremely flexible and although there are rules regarding sentence structuring, there are always several options that may depend on the emphasis made in a sentence and the sense conveyed. The alphabet has 44 letters, while some letters have 2-3 parts, for example, ‘dzs’ which is pronounced as ‘j’ and ‘sz’ that sounds as ‘s’.

The Hungarian language has been true to its roots. Despite evolving like any other language, the modern Hungarian contains an impressive 68% of its original words. To understand why this fact is nothing short of amazing, compare it to 4% retained by English and 5% kept by the Hebrew language.