Page 1 of 8

Hungarian:Sounds and Spelling

This page deals with the writing system and Magyar

pronunciation of Hungarian. It is essencial Hungarian
to reading, writing and speaking Hungarian Family Sub-family Language of
but doesn't presume any knowledge of Official language in:
Hungarian. It would, however, be beneficial Hungary , European Union
to be familiar with the International
Phonetic Alphabet Regional or Minority language in:
Finno-Ugric Ugric
Austria , Croatia ,
Romania , Serbia ,
Slovakia , Slovenia ,
Hungarian uses a modified version of the
Ukraine
Latin alphabet (which English also uses)
and employs nine letters with diacritic marks, eight digraphs (combinations of two letters) and one trigraph (combinations of three
completely regular and mostly unambiguous except at morpheme boundaries.

Contents
1 the Hungarian alphabet (a magyar ábécé)
2 the pronunciation (a kiejtés)
3 J and Ly (pontos jé és el-ipszilon)
4 loan words
4.1 Borrowings from German
4.2 Borrowings from Greek and Latin
4.3 Borrowings from Slavic
5 gemination (gemináta)
6 the vowels (a magánhangzók)
7 archaic vowels
7.1 e
7.2 i
7.3 a
8 the syllable (a szótag)
9 partial assimilation (részes hasonulás)
10 complete assimilation (teljes hasonulás)

the Hungarian alphabet (a magyar ábécé)

The Hungarian alphabet contains 44 "letters" including all 26 letters of the modern Latin alphabet (English alphabet). The 44 letters

a á b c cs d dz dzs e é f g gy h i í j k l ly m n ny o ó ö ő p q r s sz t ty u ú ü ű v w x y z zs

Each of the above monographs, digraphs, and the trigraph are considered “letters”. Each one used to be written with it's own glyph
Hungarian “runic” script, lit. carving writing). The exceptions are dz and dzs which were introduced for Turkish loanwords, and q, w
adopted as part of the Latin alphabet, predominantly to write European loan words (and in the case of y to form digraphs). the “nam

a, á, bé, cé, csé, dé, dzé, dzsé, e, é, eff, gé, gyé, há, i, í, jé or pontos jé, ká, ell, ell ipszilon, emm, enn, nyé, o, ó, ö, ő, pé, kú (q),
u, ú, ü, ű, vé, dupla vé (w), iksz (x), ipszilon (y), zé, zsé.

4/30/2011