Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and is spoken by the majority of the country's population. Several ethnic minority languages such as Russian, Romanian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian are spoken by the communities living in the country. English and German are also popular foreign languages spoken in Hungary.
What language is spoken in Hungary
Hungarian is not only the most spoken language in the country, but also the 13th most spoken in Europe. It is native to approximately 13 million native speakers. In Hungary, 99.6% of the population speaks Hungarian, which belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family and is not related to most of the languages spoken in neighboring countries. It is one of the most widely spoken and the only language in this family that is spoken in Central Europe. Hungarian is also spoken by ethnic Hungarians in other parts of the world. Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Israel and some other countries have a small numberHungarian speaking population.
Other languages of Hungary
Which languages are minority languages in Hungary?
German
German is spoken by ethnic Germans living in Hungary. A significant ethnic German population lives around the Mecsek mountain range in the southern part of the country.
Slovak
The official language of Slovakia. It is spoken by members of the Slovak minority in Hungary. This community lives mainly near Bekescsaba and in the northern Hungarian mountains.
Serbian
Serbian is mainly spoken in parts of Southern Hungary by the Serbian minority.
Slovenian
The language is spoken along the border of Hungary and Slovenia, where it is spoken by minority Slovene groups.
Croatian
Croatians are mostly concentrated in Southern Hungary.
Romanian
This language is spoken around the city of Gyula by ethnic Romanians in Hungary.
What other languages are spoken in Hungary? English and German are the most widely spoken foreign languages in the country. According to the 2011 census, 16% of the Hungarian population, which is 1,589,180 people, speak English as a foreign language. German is spoken by 1,111,997 people, which is 11.2% of the population of Hungary.
Hungarian
Hungarian is the official language of Hungary. It is the largest of the Finno-Ugric languages in terms of the number of speakers andthe only one spoken in Central Europe. Its closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, the minority languages of Russia, spoken 3,500 km east of the Ural Mountains in northwestern Siberia. It is assumed that the Hungarian language was separated from the Khanty and Mansi about 2500-3000 years ago.
Linguists believe that the ancestors of modern Hungarians first migrated westward from the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains to the steppes of southern Russia in the 4th-6th centuries and eventually moved further west into the Danube basin west of the Carpathian Mountains in the 9th century. Over the centuries, Hungarians assimilated into the surrounding European cultures. Only their language testifies to their Asian origin.
Status
Hungarian is spoken by 8,840,000 people in Hungary. It is the official language of the country used in education and public administration. It is one of the official languages of the European Union. Romania, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Israel and the United States have significant numbers of Hungarian speakers. Canada, Slovenia and Austria have smaller Hungarian speaking populations. The total number of Hungarian speakers worldwide is 12,605,590.
Dialects
The standard Hungarian spoken in Hungary is based on the variety spoken in the capital Budapest. Although the use of the standard dialect is mandatory, Hungarian has a number of urban and rural dialects. There are the following dialects of the Hungarian language:Central Transdanubian, Northeastern Hungarian, Southern Great Plains, South Transdanubian, Western Transdanubian, Oberwart (Austria), Chongo (Romania).
Standard Hungarian speakers have difficulty understanding the Oberwart dialect spoken in Austria and the Chongo dialect spoken in Romania.
Vocabulary
The basic vocabulary of the Hungarian language spoken in Hungary reflects its Finno-Ugric origin. The language also borrowed a large number of words from other languages. Some of the earliest loanwords were taken from Iranian and Turkic languages during the Hungarian migrations. More recent borrowings from German, Italian, French, Slavic and English entered the language after the Hungarians settled in Europe.
