Hungarian by the numbers

Numbers about Hungarian circulate widely, and many of them are either rounded beyond recognition or quoted without the definition behind them. This page collects the key figures, from speaker counts to cases and verb forms, and explains what each number actually measures, so you can tell a meaningful figure from a trivia fact.

Hungarian at a glance

Speakers: about 13 million

Hungarian has about 13 million native speakers. The large majority live in Hungary, and most of the rest in the neighbouring countries whose borders were redrawn after the First World War, where Hungarian-speaking communities have lived for centuries. Figures from national censuses:

Why the numbers never add up exactly: censuses ask different questions (ethnicity, mother tongue, language used at home), people can declare more than one identity, and emigrant communities in Western Europe, North America and elsewhere are not counted in a comparable way. That is why "about 13 million" is the honest figure, rather than a precise one.

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and has been an official language of the European Union since Hungary joined in 2004. It also has official or recognised minority-language status in parts of neighbouring countries, for example in the Vojvodina province of Serbia.

Letters and sounds: 44, 14 and about 25

The letter count and the sound count are close because spelling is nearly phonetic. Details are on the alphabet and pronunciation page.

Cases: why "18" is a convention

You will see Hungarian credited with anything from about 17 to over 20 cases. The disagreement is not about the facts of the language but about definitions: which suffixes count as case endings, and which are derivational suffixes or fossilised adverb endings. The most widely used count is 18:

Grammars that arrive at fewer usually drop the essive-modal -ul/-ül, which attaches to a limited set of words (magyarul, "in Hungarian") and behaves like an adverb-forming suffix. Grammars that arrive at more add suffixes such as the temporal -kor (ötkor, at five), the sociative -stul/-stül (családostul, with the whole family), the distributive -nként (darabonként, per piece) and the old locative -t/-tt found in a few town names (Pécsett, in Pécs). None of this changes what you have to learn; it only changes the label. See Hungarian cases and minor cases.

Verbs: 2 conjugations, 6 persons, 3 tenses, 3 moods

Older Hungarian had more past tenses, which survive only in archaic and literary texts; modern Hungarian uses a single past. The present is also commonly used for the future (Holnap megyek, "I'm going tomorrow"), so fog is less frequent than English "will". There is a past conditional, formed with volna (láttam volna, "I would have seen"), which is sometimes counted separately.

How many forms does one verb have?

A useful way to size the verb system is to count the cells of a transitive verb's simple (one-word) finite forms:

A few cells share a form (the 1st person plural conditional is látnánk in both conjugations, for example). Add the potential -hat/-het, which can combine with every cell, plus the infinitive, participles and personal infinitives (látnom kell, "I have to see"), and a single verb yields well over a hundred one-word forms. English see has five (see, sees, saw, seen, seeing). The comparison sounds alarming, but almost all of those Hungarian forms are built from the same small set of regular endings. See definite and indefinite conjugation and the conjugator.

Suffix variants: how many shapes per suffix?

Because of vowel harmony and linking vowels, one suffix has several written shapes. The count per suffix:

The key point for learners: these are predictable variants of one suffix, not separate endings to memorise. The suffix builder generates them automatically.

Family and history: Uralic, Finno-Ugric, Ugric

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family, in the Finno-Ugric branch and, within it, the Ugric group. Its closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, small languages of western Siberia. Finnish and Estonian are more distant relatives in the Finnic group.

With about 13 million speakers, Hungarian is the largest Uralic language, ahead of Finnish (about 5 million) and Estonian (about 1 million). The relationship is visible in grammar (agglutination, vowel harmony, no gender) and in a core of basic vocabulary:

The two languages are nonetheless not mutually intelligible. For a full comparison see Hungarian vs Finnish.

Key dates in written Hungarian

Sources and further reading

• Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), census data (2022 census)
• Daniel Abondolo (ed.), The Uralic Languages (Routledge, 1998), on the family and Hungarian's place in it
• István Kenesei, Robert M. Vago and Anna Fenyvesi, Hungarian (Descriptive Grammars series, Routledge, 1998), on cases and verbal inflection
• Péter Siptár and Miklós Törkenczy, The Phonology of Hungarian (Oxford University Press, 2000), on the vowel and consonant inventory

Frequently asked questions