Wikijunior:Languages/Hungarian

What writing system(s) does this language use?
Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet, just like English. However, the alphabet is slightly different. Hungarian uses two kinds of diacritics: the Acute accent (´) indicates long vowels, the umlaut (¨) modifies the pronunciation of sounds O and U, like in German and the double acute accent (˝) is used for long vowels with umlaut (Ő is pronounced as a long Ö).

The digraphs and trigraphs Cs, Dz, Dzs, Gy, Ly, Ny, Sz, Ty and Zs count as one letter. The letters Q, W, X and Y are mostly used in borrowed words, only W is common in older family names.

How many people speak this language?
There are about 15 million people speaking Hungarian but only about 9.5-10 million of these live in Hungary (click here to learn about Hungary). The others in the surrounding countries and all around the world, most of them in Romania and Slovakia.

What is the history of this language?
Hungarian is a Uralic language like Finnish and Estonian.

Before 1000 AD Hungarian had a different writing system called Old Hungarian script. It looks like this: . This reads rovásírás.

One of the first text written in Hungarian is the founding declaration of the Benedictine Abbey of Tihany from 1055.

Who are some famous authors or poets in this language?
Imre Kertész, who won a Nobel Prize in literature, Sándor Petőfi, Géza Gárdonyi, Ferenc Molnár, click here to see more...