page_title: Hungarian language
section_title: Writing system
hierarchical_section_title: Hungarian language / Writing system
caption_attribution_description: A copy of the Hussite Bible, in the Codex of München, dated to 1466. The Hussite Bible was the first ever translation of the Bible in the Hungarian language. This one is the first page of the New Testament.
context_page_description: Hungarian is a Uralic language spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is also spoken by communities of Hungarians in the countries that today make up Slovakia, western Ukraine, central and western Romania, northern Serbia, northern Croatia and northeastern Slovenia.
  It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America and Israel. With 13 million speakers, it is the Uralic family's largest member by number of speakers.
context_section_description: The Hungarian language was originally written in right-to-left Old Hungarian runes, superficially similar in appearance to the better-known futhark runes but unrelated. After Stephen I of Hungary established the Kingdom of Hungary in the year 1000, the old system was gradually discarded in favour of the Latin alphabet and left-to-right order. Although now not used at all in everyday life, the old script is still known and practised by some enthusiasts.
  Modern Hungarian is written using an expanded Latin alphabet, and has a phonemic orthography, i.e. pronunciation can generally be predicted from the written language. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several modified Latin characters to represent the additional vowel sounds of the language. These include letters with acute accents (á, é, í, ó, ú) to represent long vowels, and umlauts (ö and ü) and their long counterparts ő and ű to represent front vowels. Sometimes (usually as a result of a technical glitch on a computer) ⟨ô⟩ or ⟨õ⟩ is used for ⟨ő⟩, and ⟨û⟩ for ⟨ű⟩. This is often due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 code page. These letters are not part of the Hungarian language, and are considered misprints. Hungarian can be properly represented with the Latin-2 / ISO-8859-2 code page, but this code page is not always available. (Hungarian is the only language using both ⟨ő⟩ and ⟨ű⟩.) Unicode includes them, and so they can be used on the Internet.
  Additionally, the letter pairs ⟨ny⟩, ⟨ty⟩, and ⟨gy⟩ represent the palatal consonants /ɲ/, /c/, and /ɟ/ (roughly analogous to the "d+y" sounds in British "duke" or American "would you")—produced using a similar mechanism as the letter "d" when pronounced with the tongue pointing to the palate.
  Hungarian uses ⟨s⟩ for /ʃ/ and ⟨sz⟩ for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish usage. The letter ⟨zs⟩ is /ʒ/ and ⟨cs⟩ is /t͡ʃ/. These digraphs are considered single letters in the alphabet. The letter ⟨ly⟩ is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like /j/ (English ⟨y⟩), and appears mostly in old words. The letters ⟨dz⟩ and ⟨dzs⟩ /d͡ʒ/ are exotic remnants and are hard to find even in longer texts. Some examples still in common use are madzag ("string"), edzeni ("to train (athletically)") and dzsungel ("jungle").
  Sometimes additional information is required for partitioning words with digraphs: házszám ("street number") = ház ("house") + szám ("number"), not an unintelligible házs + zám.
  Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, with long vowels written with acutes. It also distinguishes between long and short consonants, with long consonants being doubled. For example, lenni ("to be"), hozzászólás ("comment"). The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs: ⟨sz⟩ + ⟨sz⟩ = ⟨ssz⟩, e.g. művésszel ("with an artist"). But when the digraph occurs at the end of a line, all of the letters are written out. For example, ("with a bus"):
  ... busz-
  szal...
  When the first lexeme of a compound ends in a digraph and the second lexeme starts with the same digraph, both digraphs are written out: jegy + gyűrű = jegygyűrű ("engagement/wedding ring", jegy means "sign", "mark". The term jegyben lenni/járni means "to be engaged"; gyűrű means "ring").
  Usually a trigraph is a double digraph, but there are a few exceptions: tizennyolc ("eighteen") is a concatenation of tizen + nyolc. There are doubling minimal pairs: tol ("push") vs. toll ("feather" or "pen").
  While to English speakers they may seem unusual at first, once the new orthography and pronunciation are learned, written Hungarian is almost completely phonemic (except for etymological spellings and "ly, j" representing /j/).
caption: Medieval Hungarian book (a copy of the Hussite Bible), 1466
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