Hungarian Language Translation

World class Hungarian language translation from qualified professional linguists

• Number of Hungarian native speakers globally: 13 million
• Hungarian is… one of the 24 official languages of the EU; recognised as a minority language in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Ukraine (most of these countries formed part of the Kingdom of Hungary before World War I)

Hungary may be in Eastern Europe, but Hungarian originates from much further east – almost 2,000 miles away, in Western Siberia.

Hungarian, a unique language, is commonly cited as one of the most difficult for non-natives to learn. As a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes distant relatives such as Finnish and Estonian, Hungarian bears no relation to the languages of its closest neighbours.

The Hungarians began to migrate from central Asia in the first half of the first millennium, slowly moving towards settling in the Carpathian basin, where they have spent the last millennium. As the people migrated, the language picked up loanwords from Iranian nomads. On arrival in Europe, Hungarian was further influenced by Slavic, Turkic and German.

The Hungarians call their language magyar. Its grammar and vocabulary are completely different to the Indo-European languages which surround Hungary: it has no gender, its word order is very flexible and, along with an elaborate system of cases, relies heavily on suffixes and prefixes. It does, however, use the Roman alphabet and has 14 vowels.

Ironically for such a complex language, the most familiar ‘Hungarian’ word to an English speaker is the simple ‘biro’ – named after the inventor and Hungarian newspaper editor, László Bíró.