Q: What kind of language is Hungarian?
A: Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family, the home of which is believed to be somewhere near the Ural Mountains that run through Russia and Kazakhstan. Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym of Uralic, as some scholars disagree about the way the languages have split off over time. Other languages in the Uralic family include Finnic, Khanty, Mansi, Mari, Mordvinic, Permic, Sami, and Samoyedic. Hungarian is an agglutinative language, meaning that suffixes are added onto the end of words to determine meaning.
Q: What languages are similar to Hungarian?
A: Hungarian is rather unique as a language, and there are differing opinions about what languages it resembles and where it came from. There are evident Turkish influences in the language and there have been attempts to compare the language to others such as Hebrew, Persian, Sanskrit, or Armenian.
Q: When was Hungarian established as a language?
A: The first written accounts of Hungarian come from around the 10th century. The first complete surviving text in Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer that dates back to the 1190s. Literature in Hungarian began to grow more extensively after the year 1300, and in 1533 the first Hungarian-language book set in movable type was published. The language began to become more standardized in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Q: Where is Hungarian spoken?
A: Romania has the second-largest number of native Hungarian speakers next to Hungary, with most of them existing in the Transylvania region. Hungarian is officially recognized as a minority language in Romania as well as in Austria, Croatia, part of Ukraine, parts of Slovenia, and Slovakia. There are also Hungarian communities in other parts of the world such as The United States, Canada, Israel, and Australia.
Q: How long does it take to learn Hungarian?
A: According the the Foreign Service Institute, which created a chart of various languages based on how difficult they would be for a native English speaker to learn, Hungarian is in Category 4. Some other category 4 languages include Albanian, Finnish, Hindi, and Thai. Category 4 languages estimate about 88 weeks (or 2200 hours) to become proficient. 88 weeks is the equivalent of just under 2 years, depending of course on how often one studies and for how long. Everybody learns differently, and what may be difficult for some people to master may take others a much shorter time (especially when you factor in the amount of immersion the learner is receiving).
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