Hungarian

Official language of the Hungarian Republic, the Hungarian language is the twelfth European official language. It is the mother tongue of about 15 million people, and approximately 2 million people speak it as a second language. According to estimates it stands in the 30th-35th position of the languages spoken throughout the world and speakers of Hungarian amount to 0.3% of the world population. Hungarian minorities have settled in the countries sharing borders with Hungary, in Western European countries, as well as in the USA, in Canada, in Australia and even in South Africa.
In 2000, Hungarian is offered as an academic subject in 36 universities in 21 countries.
Hungarian does not belong to the Indo-European linguistic family; there is no linguistic kinship between Hungarian and Germanic, Romance or Slavic languages. It is a Finno-Ugrian language. In that respect, it linguistic kin can be found beyond its immediate geographic location: Finnish and Estonian in Europe as well as several other languages of the Russian territory. These languages, along with the Samoyed languages spoken mainly in Siberia, constitute the Uralian language family (Classified from the closest to the most linguistically remote, these languages are: Vogoul, Ostiak, Votyak, Mari, Mordve, Sami, Nenet, etc ) The kinship of these languages is manifest in a number of obvious still surviving linguistic similarities. Yet without a language learning process, and despite an ancient common vocabulary, there is no mutual intelligibility between the speakers of Hungarian and the speakers of the other languages of this family. This ancient common vocabulary has bequeathed verbs expressing basic actions (lesz/to be, élni/to live, enni/to eat, menni/to go, etc), nouns denoting the parts of the body (szív/heart, kéz/hand, száj/mouth, etc), objects or natural phenomena (fa/trre, hal/fish, víz/water, hó/snow, ég/sky, etc) words relating to spatial and temporal location (alatt/under, mögött/behind, etc), as well as numbers (kettõ/two, négy/four, száz/one hundred) and pronouns (ki/who/which/that, mi/which/that, ez/this, az/that, én/me, etc) .
Later loan-words come from better known European languages (Words with a Slavic origin: király /king, megye/committee, pap/priest, etc; words coming from Latin: templom/church, mise/mass, iskola/school, etc; words with a Germanic origin: püspök/bishop, csap/tap, etc)
The Hungarian language has a long literary written tradition that began at the time of Old Hungarian, and extended from the conquest of the country (896), respectively the foundation of the State and the conversion to Christianity under the rule of King Saint Stephen and up to 1526 (Mohács's defeat). This event was lethal to the European kingdom that until then proved strong enough to resist intensive and repeated Ottoman attacks. It entailed the partition of the country into three parts: the south and the capital passed under Turkish rule, the west and the north under Austrian rule, and only Transylvania ???and its surroundings succeeding in retain relative independence. As a consequence of that partition as well as of the spread of print industry, and following the translations of the protestant and catholic Bible, regional centres were created for the promotion of the Hungarian culture and language, which today have retained their strengths as vectors of identity.
The first written text containing Hungarian words is the founding letter of the Abbey of Tihany, in 1055. The first text written entirely in Hungarian (the Funeral Oration) dates back to the end of the 12th century, whilst the first poem, The Lament of Mary, dates from the early 13th century. Renaissance Hungarian literature was significantly influenced by the poetic works of Europe-wide famous humanist Bálint Balassi.
The conflicts for the re-unification and independence of the country correspond to the Middle Hungarian period (late 18th century). The Enlightenment and the Periods of the Reforms coincided with a linguistic event: the reform of the Hungarian language. Famous nineteenth century writers' works XIXe (poets: Mihály CSOKONAI VITÉZ, Ferenc KÖLCSEY, Mihály VÖRÖSMARTY, along with Sándor PETÖFI or János ARANY; and writers like Mór JÓKAI, Kálmán MIKSZÁTH) have significantly contributed to the elaboration of standard literary Hungarian.
The promoters of linguistic reforms still condemned borrowings from foreign languages. Still, contemporary Hungarian possesses a very large number of neologisms that mainly came from English.
Acoustically, Hungarian is stressed on the initial syllable. Specific linguistic laws determine its vocalic harmony, such as for instance the lack of correlation between the duration of vowels and the stress.
From a typological viewpoint, Hungarian is an agglutinate language: its grammatical relations are rules through the adjunction of suffixes to the stem. Though words might then seem exaggeratedly long, this characteristic allows for subtle semantic distinctions.
Hungarian has no grammatical gender; articles and epithet adjectives do not follow a pattern of declination. The oppositional character of the triple-directionality of suffixes marking location contributes to the richness of the language's expressional power. The verb to have does not exist; furthermore, Hungarian possesses few verb tenses (present; past; future). It belongs to the SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language category.
The Hungarian language allows for both classical and stressed verse patterns.
Estimates claim that Hungarian words amount to more than one million.