Hungarian vs Finnish

Hungarian and Finnish are the two best-known members of the Uralic language family, and learners often hope that knowing one will unlock the other. It will not: the relationship is real but distant, far more distant than that between English and German. What the two languages do share is a recognisable grammatical architecture, and a small set of old words that still show their common origin.

The family tree: where Hungarian and Finnish sit

The Uralic family is traditionally divided into Samoyedic languages (such as Nenets) and Finno-Ugric languages. Within Finno-Ugric, Hungarian and Finnish sit on different main branches:

• Ugric: Hungarian, plus Khanty and Mansi (together called the Ob-Ugric languages), spoken in western Siberia along the Ob river and its tributaries.
• Finnic and related branches: Finnish, Estonian and their close relatives; more distantly Sami, Mordvin (Erzya and Moksha), Mari, Udmurt and Komi.

So Hungarian's closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, not Finnish or Estonian. Both Ob-Ugric languages have small speaker communities and are considered endangered. Hungarian is by far the largest Uralic language by number of speakers, followed by Finnish and then Estonian.

How long ago did the ancestors of Hungarian and Finnish separate? Dating prehistoric language splits is uncertain and estimates differ between scholars, but all of them place the split several thousand years in the past; commonly cited figures are on the order of 3,000 to 4,000 years or more. The ancestors of Hungarian speakers later moved west across the steppe and arrived in the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 9th century. In the meantime Hungarian absorbed loanwords from Iranian, Turkic (see Hungarian vs Turkish), Slavic, German and Latin sources, which further widened the gap.

Cognates: the words that prove the link

Relatedness is established not by look-alike words but by regular sound correspondences across many words. The pairs below are standard textbook examples of inherited Uralic vocabulary. Many belong to the most basic layer of any language: body parts, water, numbers, fish, verbs like "live" and "go".

The pattern table is the real evidence. Initial k before a back vowel in Finnish regularly matches Hungarian h (kala / hal, kolme / három, kuusi / hat), while before a front vowel both keep k (käsi / kéz). Initial p in Finnish matches Hungarian f (puu / fa, pää / fej). This is the same kind of shift that links English fish and father to Latin piscis and pater.

Beyond this core, most everyday vocabulary is unrelated. Counting from one to ten shows how far apart the languages are:

Two, three, four and six are cognates; the rest are not recognisably related. See Hungarian numbers for the full Hungarian system.

Shared grammar: the Uralic family resemblance

Where the family link shows most clearly is in how words and sentences are built.

Agglutination

Both languages build words by stacking suffixes, each with one clear job (see how Hungarian words are built). "In my house" is a házamban (ház-am-ban, house-my-in) in Hungarian and talossani (talo-ssa-ni, house-in-my) in Finnish. The order of possessive and case differs, but the logic is the same.

Vowel harmony

Both languages choose suffix vowels to match the stem: Hungarian házban / kertben, Finnish talossa / metsässä ("in the forest"). In both, e and i behave as neutral vowels. Hungarian adds a third, rounded option in some suffixes (-hoz / -hez / -höz). See vowel harmony.

Three-way local cases

This is the most striking parallel. Both languages express location with sets of three cases: where, where to, where from.

A Finnish speaker learning Hungarian local cases already knows the system; only the suffixes are new.

No gender, one "he/she"

Neither language has grammatical gender, and each has a single third-person pronoun for "he" and "she": Hungarian ő, Finnish hän. See personal pronouns.

No verb "to have"

Both express possession with "to be": Hungarian (Nekem) van egy kutyám ("to me is a dog-of-mine"), Finnish Minulla on koira ("at me is a dog"). The case differs (dative vs adessive), but the construction is the same idea. See van and nincs.

More shared traits

• Stress on the first syllable of every word.
• Singular nouns after numerals: Hungarian két ház, Finnish kaksi taloa (partitive singular), never a plural.
• Possessive suffixes instead of (or alongside) possessive pronouns: házam, taloni.
• Postpositions rather than prepositions.
• A question clitic: Hungarian -e (Jön-e?), Finnish -ko/-kö (Tuleeko?).
• Phonemic vowel and consonant length: Hungarian kor / kór, Finnish tuli / tuuli ("fire" / "wind").

The key differences

Two of these deserve emphasis for Hungarian learners. The definite conjugation has no Finnish counterpart, although the Ob-Ugric languages, Hungarian's closest relatives, do have similar object conjugations. And Hungarian verbal prefixes with their movable position are a Hungarian development without a Finnish parallel.

What this means for learners

• Finnish speakers learning Hungarian have a real head start with the logic: case stacking, local case triads, vowel harmony, "have" with "be", singular after numbers. Vocabulary, articles, definite conjugation and word order are all new.
• Hungarian speakers learning Finnish find the concepts familiar but must learn the partitive, consonant gradation and the negative verb from scratch.
• English speakers should not expect studying one to make the other easy, but a learner who has already absorbed agglutination and vowel harmony in one will find the second far less alien.

For how Hungarian compares with English as a learning target, see Hungarian vs English and is Hungarian hard?

Sources and further reading

• Daniel Abondolo (ed.), The Uralic Languages (Routledge, 1998), chapters on Hungarian, Finnish and the Ob-Ugric languages
• István Kenesei, Robert M. Vago and Anna Fenyvesi, Hungarian (Descriptive Grammars series, Routledge, 1998)
• Péter Siptár and Miklós Törkenczy, The Phonology of Hungarian (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Frequently asked questions