Sources and reference works

These are the works our guides are checked against. They are also the best next step if you want to go deeper than any website can take you.

Grammars written in English

• Carol H. Rounds, Hungarian: An Essential Grammar (2nd ed., Routledge, 2009). The most accessible complete grammar for English-speaking learners. Clear on morphology and usage.
• István Kenesei, Robert M. Vago and Anna Fenyvesi, Hungarian (Descriptive Grammars series, Routledge, 1998). A comprehensive linguistic description; the standard reference for detail.
• Miklós Törkenczy, Hungarian Verbs and Essentials of Grammar (2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2008). Compact and precise on verb forms and their patterns.
• Katalin É. Kiss, The Syntax of Hungarian (Cambridge University Press, 2002). The key work on topic, focus and word order.
• Péter Siptár and Miklós Törkenczy, The Phonology of Hungarian (Oxford University Press, 2000). The authoritative account of Hungarian sounds, vowel harmony and stem alternations.

Hungarian-language references

• Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, A magyar helyesírás szabályai (12th ed., Akadémiai Kiadó, 2015). The official spelling rules, followed on this site for spelling, hyphenation and the writing of numbers and dates.
• Ferenc Kiefer (ed.), Strukturális magyar nyelvtan (Akadémiai Kiadó, 1992 onward). A multi-volume structural grammar of Hungarian.
• HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics (Nyelvtudományi Kutatóközpont), language advice service, for questions of current usage.

Background and data

• Daniel Abondolo (ed.), The Uralic Languages (Routledge, 1998), for the relationship of Hungarian to Finnish and the other Uralic languages.
• Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), census data, for speaker and population figures.
• US Foreign Service Institute, language difficulty categories, for estimates of learning time.

How we use sources

Where references disagree or describe variation, the guides say so. Where modern usage has moved on from older descriptions, we follow current standard usage and note the difference. See our editorial standards for the full process.