Hungarian vs Turkish

Put a Hungarian and a Turkish sentence side by side and the resemblance is striking: long words built from suffixes, vowels that harmonise, no "he" versus "she", and a word for "there is" doing the work of "to have". It is natural to assume the languages are related. They are not, at least not by descent. This page explains why they look alike, what really connects them historically, and where they differ.

Related or not? The short history of a question

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family, with Finnish, Estonian, Khanty and Mansi (see Hungarian vs Finnish). Turkish belongs to the Turkic family, with Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek, Chuvash and others.

In the 19th century, many scholars grouped Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic and other languages together in a hypothetical "Ural-Altaic" family, largely because of shared features like agglutination and vowel harmony. That hypothesis has been abandoned by mainstream linguistics. Shared structure is not enough to prove common descent: one needs regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary, and between Uralic and Turkic these have not been demonstrated. Basic words tell the story at once:

The historical confusion is old. Medieval Byzantine writers sometimes called the Hungarians "Turks", because the early Hungarians lived among Turkic peoples on the steppe and shared much of their way of life. That cultural closeness left a genuine trace in the Hungarian vocabulary, but not in its ancestry.

The real connection: early Turkic loanwords

Before the Hungarians settled in the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 9th century, they spent centuries in contact with Turkic-speaking peoples in the steppe region north of the Black Sea. During that time Hungarian borrowed a substantial layer of words, especially relating to agriculture, animal husbandry and social life. These loans came from a western branch of Old Turkic, related to the ancestor of modern Chuvash, not from the language of the later Ottoman Turks.

The pair ökör / öküz shows why linguists can identify the source branch. Where most Turkic languages, including Turkish, have z, the Chuvash-type branch has r, and Hungarian borrowed the r form. The loans are thoroughly naturalised: they follow Hungarian vowel harmony and take Hungarian suffixes like any native word (almát, almák, almával).

A second, much smaller layer of Turkish words arrived during the Ottoman period, when much of Hungary was under Ottoman rule (Buda fell in 1541 and was retaken in 1686). One example is papucs ("slipper", Turkish papuç). Considering the length of that occupation, it left surprisingly few words in the standard language.

Why they look alike: typology, not genealogy

Languages can share structure for reasons other than descent: long contact, similar drift, or simply because some combinations of features work well together. Linguists call a language's structural profile its typology. Hungarian and Turkish share a typological profile to a remarkable degree.

Agglutination with the same suffix order

Both languages attach one suffix per meaning, and in the same order: stem, plural, possessive, case.

See how Hungarian words are built and possessive suffixes.

Vowel harmony

Both languages pick suffix vowels by the vowels of the stem. Turkish has a two-way harmony (-de/-da, -ler/-lar) and a four-way harmony that also tracks rounding (-i/-ı/-u/-ü). Hungarian has mainly two-way harmony (-ban/-ben), plus three-way suffixes that track rounding in front vowels (-hoz/-hez/-höz). Both languages have the front rounded vowels ö and ü.

"There is" instead of "to have"

Neither language has an everyday verb "to have". Both say "my X exists":

• Van egy kutyám. Hungarian: "There is a dog-of-mine."
• Bir köpeğim var. Turkish: "A dog-of-mine there is."
• Van kenyér? Nincs. Is there bread? No.
• Ekmek var mı? Yok. Is there bread? No.

Hungarian van / nincs and Turkish var / yok are a neat functional match. See van and nincs.

Singular after numbers

Hungarian két alma and Turkish iki elma ("two apples") both use the singular. See the plural.

Marking a definite object

Both languages care whether an object is definite, but they mark it in different places. Turkish marks the noun: the accusative suffix appears only on definite objects (Elmayı yedim, "I ate the apple", vs Elma yedim, "I ate apples / had some apple"). Hungarian marks every object with -t but marks definiteness on the verb (Megettem az almát vs Ettem egy almát). See definite and indefinite conjugation.

Feature comparison table

Word order: the biggest practical difference

Turkish is a fairly consistent verb-final language: Ben elmayı yedim ("I the apple ate"). Hungarian was once described as SOV too, and verb-final orders are common in it, but modern Hungarian word order is governed by information structure: the topic comes first and the focused element sits directly before the verb (see word order and focus). The same Hungarian sentence can appear as Péter megette az almát, Az almát Péter ette meg or Péter az almát ette meg, each with a different emphasis. A Turkish speaker's instinct to put the verb last will often produce an unintended focus in Hungarian.

Both languages do care about focus, but they mark it differently in questions. Turkish places the question particle after the word being asked about: Ali geldi mi? ("Did Ali come?") versus Ali mi geldi? ("Was it Ali who came?"). Hungarian moves the questioned word into the position before the verb and pushes any prefix behind it: Megjött Péter? ("Did Péter arrive?") versus Péter jött meg? ("Was it Péter who arrived?"). The meaning contrast is the same; the tool is position rather than a particle. See Hungarian questions.

What this means for learners

• Turkish speakers learning Hungarian arrive with the right mental model for suffix stacking, vowel harmony, "have" with "exist" and singular after numbers. They need to learn articles, a much bigger case system, the definite conjugation, verbal prefixes and focus-based word order.
• Hungarian speakers learning Turkish find the morphology familiar but must adjust to final stress, strict verb-final order, four-way harmony and evidentiality.
• English speakers who have studied one of the two will find the other's word structure much less daunting, but should not expect shared vocabulary beyond the handful of old loans.

Sources and further reading

• Daniel Abondolo (ed.), The Uralic Languages (Routledge, 1998), introduction and chapter on Hungarian
• István Kenesei, Robert M. Vago and Anna Fenyvesi, Hungarian (Descriptive Grammars series, Routledge, 1998)
• Katalin É. Kiss, The Syntax of Hungarian (Cambridge University Press, 2002), on Hungarian word order

Frequently asked questions