Hungarian

Last Updated: 2020-06-29

Background

Language Family: Uralic / Finno-Ugric / Hungarian

• Hungarian is spoken in Hungary and in several surrounding countries as well as in the United States, Canada, and Israel.
• I have chosen to represent Educated Colloquial Hungarian (ECH), the dialect spoken in Budapest, Hungary.

Phonology

Consonants

• /m/ and /ɲ/ are consistently listed as phonemes in Hungarian (Szende 1994, 91; Siptár and Törkenczy 2000, 207); however, there is some debate around /n/. Siptár and Törkenczy (2000) explain that rather than having a nasal phoneme specified for place, Hungarian has a placeless /N/ that preconsonantally assimilates (p. 207). I have, however, chosen to follow Szende (1994) and use the alveolar nasal (p. 91).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d		c ɟ	k ɡ
Affricates		ts dz	tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ			h
Nasals	m	n		ɲ
Trills		r
Approximants		l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive in Hungarian (Szende 1994, 92). Long vowels are indicated by an acute (´) or double acute (˝) accent.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i iː y yː		u uː
High-Mid	eː ø øː		o oː
Low-Mid	ɛ
Low		aː	ɑ
Note: Phonemes with the diacritic (ː) are phonemically long. The two high front vowels on the left are unrounded and the two on the right are rounded. The high-mid front vowel on the left is unrounded and the two on the right are rounded.

Alphabet

• ⟨q⟩, ⟨w⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩ appear only in loanwords and in traditional surnames (Rounds 2001, 3).

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/ɑ/
á	/aː/
b	/b/
c	/ts/
d	/d/
e	/ɛ/
é	/eː/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/
i	/i/
í	/iː/
j	/j/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
ó	/oː/
ö	/ø/
ő	/øː/
p	/p/
r	/r/
s	/ʃ/
t	/t/
u	/u/
ú	/uː/
ü	/y/
ű	/yː/
v	/v/
z	/z/
Multigraph
cs	/tʃ/
dz	/dz/
dzs	/dʒ/
gy	/ɟ/
ly	/j/
ny	/ɲ/
sz	/s/
ty	/c/
zs	/ʒ/

Lenition Rules

• Degemination occurs across word boundaries, and affricates remain unmerged in careful speech. In colloquial speech, the first affricate may lenite into a fricative (Siptár and Törkenczy 2000, p 83).
• Geminates also weaken intervocalically (Bauer 1988, 383).

Misc. Rules

• All consonants can geminate in Hungarian (Magyar 2015, 288). Orthographically this involves repetition of graphemes. For multigraphs, geminates are indicated by duplication of the first consonant (Korompay 2012, 341).

References

Bauer, Laurie. 1988. “What Is Lenition?” Journal of Linguistics.

Korompay, Klára. 2012. “Orthographies in Early Modern Europe.” In, edited by Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste. DE GRUYTER. doi:10.1515/9783110288179.

Magyar, Lilla. 2015. “Are Universal Markedness Hierarchies Learnable from the Lexicon? The Case of Gemination in Hungarian.”

Rounds, Carol H. 2001. Hungarian: An Essential Grammar. Taylor & Francis Ltd. https://www.ebook.de/de/product/37209668/carol_h_rounds_hungarian_an_essential_grammar.html.

Siptár, Péter, and Miklós Törkenczy. 2000. The Phonology of Hungarian. Oxford University Press.

Szende, Tamás. 1994. “Hungarian.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 24 (2): 91–94.