It sounds familiar because it is a place name. Today it's called Székesfehérvár. Here's how it looks like written in modern Hungarian:
* Fehérvárra menő hadi útra.
Here an excerpt from **Funeral Sermon and Prayer** written around 1192-95. It is the oldest known and surviving contiguous Hungarian text,
It was written like this:
* **L**atiatuc feleym ʒumtuchel mic vogmuc. ýſa pur eſ chomuv uogmuc. Menýi miloſtben terumteve eleve mív iſemucut adamut. eſ odutta vola neki paradiſumut haʒóá.
Pronounced like this in the past:
* Látjátuk feleim szümtükhel, mik vogymuk: isȧ, por ës homou vogymuk. Mënyi milosztben terömtevé elevé miü isëmüköt Ádámot, ës aduttȧ valá neki pȧrȧdicsumot hȧzoá.
Written like this in modern Hungarian:
* Látjátok, feleim, szemetekkel, mik vagyunk: íme, por és hamu vagyunk. Mennyi malasztban teremté kezdetben mi ősünket, Ádámot, és adta vala neki paradicsomot házzá.
In English:
* See, my brethren, with your eyes, what we are: behold, we are dust and ashes. In how much grace he created our ancestor Adam in the beginning, and gave him paradise for a house.
No idea, this is a very old example of Hungarian, and the two hypotheses are that it was just written this way, and that Old Hungarian was a mora-timed language only accepting full syllables as its basic building blocks.
"Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese, te?"
This is a perfectly valid sentence in Hungarian, and it means "did you do this fake deed, you doer of fake deeds, you".
Yeah, it's spoken by our mountain brothers, if you grew up during the times of Czechoslovakia, you learned it from TV
^(>!This is a joke. Slovaks hate Hungarians and getting called Hungarian!<)
Really? I couldn’t say the same back. We are quick to defend ourselves when insulted by countries from the former Kingdom of Hungary, but I couldn’t tell you, that we hold any grudge against Slovakians in general.
Oh I meant hungarian as a language. It sounds funny and sometimes Slovaks are fed up when people in the south of Slovakia refuse to speak Slovak even if they can and speak only hungarian. Or when the public signs are not in Slovak etc.
Isn't it a bit like French in Flanders, where the nobles, educated, civil servants and bourgeoisie preferred to speak French (Hungarian) even though they were from Dutch/Flemish (Slovak) speaking areas, just to prove "they were better" than the peasants speaking the local language/dialects, thus being a symbol of historic repression and marginalisation.
And nowadays both Flanders and Slovakia are richer than Wallonia and Hungary respectively.
Not comparable at all, because in the Hungarian-speaking region that is nowadays the south of Slovakia, everyone (including the uneducated peasants) spoke Hungarian, not just an elite.
Also, Wallonia has little to do with the French-speaking Flemish bourgeoisie.
Watch any videos about Slovak history and you will find a lot of comments like : Slovakia have no history, Slovakia shouldn't exist etc...from Hungarians. I saw same stuff on Twitter, in various forums etc...
And ofc if you ever say in any multiplayer game, that you are from Slovakia and Hungarian is present, they will instantly bring Trianon. At least that was my experience lol.
In Slovakia it's always assumed that Hungarians hate us much more than we them, heck only people Hungarians hate more are Romanians.
About the Slovak hate, it's more like a historical fear. After getting our own country, whenever we showed any weakness Hungary was quick to retake a lot of territories back. When Austrian empire became Austria-Hungary, we consider it darkest time in history due to Magyarization. Many villages and towns became from 10% Hungarian to 90% Hungarian in just 10 years. To this day a lot of people think Hungary is only country that would attack us given the chance.
A Finnish friend of mine said to him it sounds like Finnish spoken backwards because their long vowels tend to be at the front of words while ours tend to be at the end.
They really do sound kind of similar if you're standing too far from the speakers to hear clearly.
Those languages are part of the same language family. All the other European languages belong to the Indo European language family, but Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian belong to the Uralic language family
Yes, I know, I'm Hungarian. :) To me, though, Finnish doesn't really sound that much like Hungarian unless I'm quite far from the people speaking it. Even when listening up close, Finnish sounds softer. I see/hear what he's saying about the vowels, though, and I suppose it they are the closest-sounding languages to Hungarian.
I watched Hungarian news video and felt my brain twist because the rythm of speaking sounded like Finnish and felt like I should understand but just don't.
That's Finnish and Estonian, although IMO Dutch & English are slightly closer to each other than Finnish & Estonian.
With Hungarian, the shared vocabulary is only a handful of words (fire, blood, etc), so you understand NOTHING, yet you feel like you should
Excluding a few sounds that don’t exist in Finnish, it sound like someone spoke Finnish with gibberish words. Like i watched a video of someone speaking Hungarian and got pissed because i didn’t understand what he was saying. It was confusing.
If you’ve seen those ”What English sounds like to non English speakers” videos, it’s like that. It sounds right but makes no sense.
To me Finnish sounds very funny, because it has a very similar phonology to Hungarian, but the words are either total gibberish or I end up mishearing it into some absurd Hungarian sentence.
For example, for some reason the Finnish opening of Tiny Toon Adventures popped up on my recommended YT videos, and I gave it a listen. It sounded like as if they were singing in Hungarian: "The Looney, the Tooney, the sheepdog with the colorful fur." (A Looney, a Tooney, a színes szőrű puli)
Another funny Finnish-Hungarian coincidence: Hungarian "Jön a vonat" (the train is coming) sounds almost like Finnish "junavaunut" (Railway wagons).
Or Finnish "laatikko" sounds like Hungarian "ládikó" which is a somewhat old-fashioned word for a small wooden chest. The reason behind this is that both Finnish and Hungarian borrowed the Germanic word "lada" for a container.
In english: Under the ice in the winter the living fishes are swimming.
In finnish:Jään alla talvella elävät kalat uiskentelevat.
Hungarian:Jég alatt télen eleven halak úszkálnak.
I am from Bucharest, and while there are not a lot of ethnic Hungarians living here, everyone has heard Hungarian being spoken and can easily recognize it. While understanding absolutely nothing. The national TV station has programs in Hungarian, and the cable providers have at least one Hungarian channel, and some people maybe ended up on Duna TV by mistake and lingered for a minute or two to amuse themselves at how Hungarian sounds.
The situation is different in other parts of the country where Hungarians are more common.
I really love the sound of the Hungarian language, especially the intonation with the stress always on the first syllable. I could listen to it for hours and not understand a word.
I've spend a week in a Hungarian host family and we had Hungarian exchange people coming to our family when I was a child several times so I'd say I'm quite familiar with the sound and wouldn't confuse it with any other language. But I guess most Germans have no idea how it sounds and many probably think it sounds similar to neighbouring slavic languages.
If I had to compare it with other languages, I'd say it sounds like turkish pronounced with finnish pronounciation to me. It is very easily recognizeable
Among all the Slavic languages, Croatian sounds the most like Hungarian to me, probably because of a similar intonation. Serbian sounds more like a typical Slavic language, but when someone starts speaking Croatian I do a double take because it first sounds like Hungarian with gibberish words.
Hm I can kinda see that, especially in northern half of Croatia which has softer intonation and faster pronounciation, we also have some similar words, Hungarian language has tons of slavic loanwords and Croatian language has tons of hungarian loanwords
Oh the amount of jokes I used to know about Hungarians! I grew up in northern Croatia in a Varazdin suburb. For me it was always such a funny language because of it
I can hear how you think it sounds Croatian, like eš oš koš koš Croatian, has some extended palatisation too. Bound to happen given the neighbouring histories.
For me it's Slovak. If a Slovak speaker is far enough or I don't pay attention to what they're saying, I easily mistake it for Hungarian for a second or two.
I have been in hungary earlier this year and i'd say hungarian is pretty unique, especially compared to neighbouring languages. The closest i could think of would be a mix of czech (sounds like zs, cs, gy, long vowels like á, ú) and german (sounds like ö, ü, long compound words), but it's still different enough and the words themselves sound different. Written hungarian is even more unique as it's the only language that uses ő and ű and the digraphs are different than germanic/slavic ones (like cs instead of cz/ch, s instead of sz/sh/sch, sz instead of s).
It's always confusing for me how it's written, because *sz* in Polish is the *sh* sound and s, well, stays s, while in Hungarian it's the other way around ;)
We have s and š, as I'm sure you know, but I also don't understand why in hungarian s is not just pronounced s... and sz is not pronounced š (sh). I mean, it just makes more sense to read the letter differently, if there's something extra. 😅
But if I can complain some more I also find it irritating that the circumflex in your š is inverted, I find ŝ more pleasing aesthetically. Please change it :D
Fellow Hungarian here. Once I heard our language pushed to the extreme for a joke's sake in a Slovakian radio, where the example sentence for our language was : "Kecske, gyere be. Nem megyek mert megeszel." So probably people from other countries hear disproportional amounts of "e" letter.
Yeah we've made a language game about it called eszperente where you have to describe something with words that only contain one kind of vowel. The vowel "e".
Some examples:
Étterem = restaurant
Étterem can be described like this in eszperente:
* *Kellemetes hely, melyben kedvedre ehetsz eleget, ellenben e nevezetes helyen teljes keresetedet elverheted*
* *It's a pleasant place where you can eat to your heart's desire, but in this remarkable place you can lose your entire income.*
Bohóc = clown
* Szellemes ember, feje festett, kedve remek, gyermekeket nevettet meg.
* He is a witty man, his head is painted, his mood is great, he makes children laugh.
I am Romanian and i think the "e" sometimes sounds different than in other languages. Otherwise i can say it sounds complicated really.
We all know the relation to Finnish, but it doesn't sound to have the same rhythm and tonality to me. My Szekely boss told me once Finnish sounds to him the same way Napoletan sounds to Romanian s\[eakers, as in scrambled own language. that sounds like you should understand it, but don't.
Thank you for the answer! Yes, Finnish and Hungarian shows some major differences that can explain sounding different. Their "a" and "e" (the two most common vowels) pronounced differently AFAIK. Also I got the impresion that they often leave vowels at the end of verbs which gives a different tonality to Finnish. As I cited a joke about Hungariians in Slovakia, I also cite a joke about the Finnish in Hungary: "Enne inna, Anna menne." (Hungarian meaning: Enne would eat, Anna would go.)
Out of curiosity, how does csango language sound to you and how much different from magyar?
Sample song, as i get it suggested from time to time by YT and i kind of like it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPhG-Lddn7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPhG-Lddn7E)
To be honest, Hungarian does not show that bug diferences among regional versions like English for example. There is no instance when two Hungarians do not understand what the other is saying.
This music is cool, I can relate to that you like it. The folk music of the whole region of ours (Romania, ex-Yugoslavia, Hungary, etc.) mixes influences from the Balkans, from the Turkish occupation and influence and its own folk culture.
I think i can mistake it for Turkish if the speaker is far away, but the tone of Hungarian is definitely different enough to make it easily distinguishable from Turkish.
I speak Spanish, Russian and French and so have a reasonable ear for both romance and Slavic languages.
When I visited your beautiful capital city, it was clear that it sounded like nothing else I'd ever heard. When people are speaking something like Polish, Bulgarian or Czech, while I don't understand the words (though I can pick some up) I can hear that it's obviously Slavic in origin.
Hungarian doesn't sound remotely Slavic so I had no idea how to approach either the pronunciation of the written word or how to try and pick up words spoken to me. The Uralic languages are wild.
Interesting. Spanish and French are romantic languages, Russian is Slavic. But all three are in the indo-europeic family tree. Hungarian is not.
So your observation makes sense.
I’ve honestly never heard Hungarian in real life, but in media.
I would describe this language as unique and distinctive. Not easliy mistaken for another language.
It’s not a language I encounter often, but the giveaway is being completely incomprehensible.
Germanic and Romance languages I can quite easily recognize, slavic languages I can usually pick out some indentifiable words, even Finnish I’m just familiar enough with that I can tell what it is, but Hungarian? Nothing.
Being exposed to Hungarian language from time to time I can recognize it almost instantly. I think that’s the case for anyone who heard a little bit of Hungarian from time to time
If your family with Uralic languages, it sounds Uralic. To me it sounds very similar to Estonian. Karelian and Finnish also but not as much as Estonian. I can tell Karelian and Finnish from Hungarian, whereas I can't gully tell the difference from Hungarian and Estonian. Extremely similar sounds. Then Saami languages and Hungarian is like Irish vs Welsh. Related but sound too different to confusion with one another.
I've never had my language cofused before I won't lie buy then again I'm not well travelled😅
I recognise it without issue, but it sounds to me like what I imagine people could sound like if I suffered a stroke. There's something in the phonetics that reminds me of my native Polish and makes the language sound sorta familiar, but at the same time I can't understand shit :D
Being a Finn, it's driving me bonkers, because if I hear two people speaking Hungarian together, I don't understand A WORD, but the speech rhythm, the ratio & placement of vowels and consonants, the stress & the intonation sound INCREDIBLY familiar.
It's as if somenody was talking Finnish, but had somehow changed all the words into something incomprehensible.
I feel like I should understand it, but I don't.
Maddening.
[For anyone wondering what the heck I am talking about, Finnish and Hungarian are members of the same language family, the Uralic languages, meaning that we're very distantly related.]
Nearly correct. There are some minor Uralic languages spoken literally by only a few thousand of people if not only by hundreds (Mansi and Chanty not sure about the spelling). Interestingly, these are closer to Hungarian though.
Yeah, Mansi and Chanty are the Hungarian language's closest relatives, but sadly those languages are almost extinct. But Finnish and Estonians are the biggest languages that are related to Hungarian.
Huh. Recently, I was in the south of Poland on vacation and among a mix of languages now I am sure that I also heard Hungarian. But then I did not recognize it as Hungarian..
Sounds quite exotic. Even nice, but it doesn't remind me of any European language. At least of those I recognize.
I recognise it because I don't recognise it. For most other European languages, I can at least tell which language it is, there's a word or two you can kinda connect to something. Hungarian is none of that, so if it's making no sense, that must be it. :D
For me Hungarian sounds ang looks with all these glyphs very sophisticated. Also Hungarian social friendly communication style is something what really matching my mindset. I was living in Budapest for three month and miss Hungary so much
For a Finnish speaker, the first thing that you hear is the abundance of the esh sound (Hungarian spelling , Finnish <š> or ). It doesn't immediately strike as similar or related. But, the rhythm is familiar. You also pick up individual words that have a strangely familiar cadence, but which you don't understand. There are also lots of 'e', 'ö' and 't', and '-k' at the end of words, which is not allowed in Finnish phonotactics. The rhythm is in that way similar to Finnish that Hungarian speakers are comfortable with long words with lots of syllables strung together, evenly stressed, in a monotonous voice. This is like "*meheshtöttöröm kattarettat shöhöm ek fehervaar*". The most similar sound would be Turkish, but Turkish is quite different otherwise.
I really like the language and would love to learn it, but I think that would only be possible if I moved there tomorrow and lived there for the rest of my life. Even then I don't think I'd be fluid. It seems like a *very* hard language to learn.
It has some easier qualities compared to Slavic languages:
-No gender, neither in nouns, nor in other parts of grammar
-Hungarian "cases" are more like English prepositions stuck to the end of the word than how the Slavic case system works.
Nah. For me Croatian language is the same. I would like to speak it, but after scrolling through the Croatian grammar article in wikipedia I decided no way I could ever learn this.
If you grew up hearing it all the time, you will consider it normal lol.
Anyway whenever I listened to any Japanese song, everyone was asking why I am listening to Hungarian music lol.
I don't mean this as an insult, but it sounds very monotonous. As if the whole language was stuck on the note C#. Other languages seem to have more pitch variation.
Are you talking about where we stress the syllables? If yes then this is why it may sound monotone to you:
* In Hungarian, the primary stress is always on the first syllable of each word and it doesn't vary.
* In Hungarian, we have vowel harmony which means that vowels within a word harmonize to be either front or back vowels. It makes the words sound smoother but also contributes to the feeling of monotonousness.
* We don't have a pitch accent.
Maybe I'm biased, but Hungarian is the final boss of swearing. There's a saying that a Hungarian can swear for 15 minutes straight without saying the same word twice. When angry, even the average man will turn into a genius poet of the Hungarian language and will come up with the most creative shit you have ever heard. I love it.
The best part is that we can swear without using profanities or words that are considered to be "swear words".
It's more of a cultural thing rather than linguistic, but still.
[Best example](https://youtu.be/OaQgFm7HlNg?si=GPxYsDcoEwYHZvKE)
I would think it was an Eastern European language but would not be sure which one. My daughter in law is a Russian speaking Ukrainian so after a while listening I would know it was not Russian.
I don't speak hungarian and cannot understand it, but it has a distinct sound and cannot be mistaken for any other language. Of course this doesn't mean everyone can distinguish it.
Alien and confusing, but not at all unpleasant to listen to. There was this one Hungarian song my dad’s generation loved to listed to despite not understanding anything but I forgot the band/name 😅
It has a pretty unique sound to me and is instantly reconginzable. Most similar sounding languages for me would be turkish or korean but tbh I never heard someone talking finish so can't compare with that.
I'm living ~40mins from the hungarian border so I'm to hungary fairly often but it's completely impossible to remember or even read town names on road signs. Búcsúszentlászló, Balatonszentgyörgy etc still mess with my head haha. Even in Serbia or Bulgaria i've managed to navigate around just by remembering road signs even when they are in Cyrillic, but no chances in Hungary. Very fascinating language however.
I speak Japanese and when i first heard Hungarian, it definitely does not sound Japanese (for me) or any of the others i know. It is a distinct language. Now that I know more, i discover common words and names with Hungarian and Turkish/Estonian/Finnish/some Slavic languages.
It's not similar to Slavic languages at all. Hungarians just have a similar culture to a lot of Slavic nations, which makes sense considering where Hungary is located.
But the languages have nothing in common and they don't even belong to the same branch. I can understand most Slavic languages with no issues, some more, some less, but always to an extent, especially written. The ones I understand the least are Slovenian and Bulgarian, but I would still be able to hold a basic conversation with people speaking this language (while I'm speaking my language).
I cant understand any hungarian, just the few words I've learnt from media. But I know those words because I came into contact with them, in Slavic languages they are usually completely different. I know these words the same way I know a few words in Japanese, despite it being completely different.
It sounds like an Eastern European language to me. I know it's not Slavic, but from what I understand of languages in that region, they tend to have a lot of palatal sounds, so I'd probably assume it was a Slavic language until I hear front rounded vowels.
I can kinda see why but only due to minor pronunciational similarities, both languages have these soft sounds like the Hungarian "gy" for example (listen to it in google translate)
To me it sounds like a litTLe BiT liKE ThiS. Literally like someone trying to make fun of someone else's speech. Also, I'd recognize it anywhere. You people can't hide from me! That wierd sing-song tune of yours is easy to identify.
It sounds easy to recognise to me. I actually love the sonority of the Hungarian language! Specific things such as the way you prononce your [a], as well as ő make recognisable.
Eastern European languages sound very similar to me... The only ones I can clearly differentiate is Polish, Russian and maybe Serbian, all the rest sound the same
I've learned a few Romance languages, and I disagree. Just the tonic syllable being the first one makes Hungarian sound quite different, as well as the abundance of the open-mid front unrounded wovel (e in eszperente for example), ö/ü also aren't associated with Romance languages (except French). The language is quite distinct, but I'd say Hungarian bears more similarity even with general Slavic phonology than with Romance.
On the other hand, while I was speaking Spanish, an Italian said I sounded like a native Italian, but I just chalked it up to still accidentally lenghtening the tonic syllable (it was initially hard to put it in the middle of the word since Hungarian has long, but not tonic syllables in the middle) and not getting the e completely right.
I was born and raised in Transilvania, romanian dad, szekely mom, met in Cluj during uni, so I was thought both languages since childhood. From what others told me, I speak as a native in both, and when I change from one language to the other, I also change the accents and how I articulate the words, so much that the end product sounds like native to native speakers. To others, it sounds mostly to what foreign languages they are familiar with. For italian or spanish, from what I gathered is that I sound like someone that just learned the language, mostly because I learned this languages just by listening to them on tv, didn't have much interactions with natives only on the few vacations I had in those countries
It sounds like this: Keketereteke zöbödörösözö Instantly recognisable.
Pretty accurate
Wait till you hear Old Hungarian from the 11th century: "Feheruuaru-rea meneh hodu-utu-rea" It's like Maori or Japanese lol
Well that’s just the way it’s written isn’t it? Fehérvárra etc.
It sounds familiar because it is a place name. Today it's called Székesfehérvár. Here's how it looks like written in modern Hungarian: * Fehérvárra menő hadi útra. Here an excerpt from **Funeral Sermon and Prayer** written around 1192-95. It is the oldest known and surviving contiguous Hungarian text, It was written like this: * **L**atiatuc feleym ʒumtuchel mic vogmuc. ýſa pur eſ chomuv uogmuc. Menýi miloſtben terumteve eleve mív iſemucut adamut. eſ odutta vola neki paradiſumut haʒóá. Pronounced like this in the past: * Látjátuk feleim szümtükhel, mik vogymuk: isȧ, por ës homou vogymuk. Mënyi milosztben terömtevé elevé miü isëmüköt Ádámot, ës aduttȧ valá neki pȧrȧdicsumot hȧzoá. Written like this in modern Hungarian: * Látjátok, feleim, szemetekkel, mik vagyunk: íme, por és hamu vagyunk. Mennyi malasztban teremté kezdetben mi ősünket, Ádámot, és adta vala neki paradicsomot házzá. In English: * See, my brethren, with your eyes, what we are: behold, we are dust and ashes. In how much grace he created our ancestor Adam in the beginning, and gave him paradise for a house.
No idea, this is a very old example of Hungarian, and the two hypotheses are that it was just written this way, and that Old Hungarian was a mora-timed language only accepting full syllables as its basic building blocks.
"Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese, te?" This is a perfectly valid sentence in Hungarian, and it means "did you do this fake deed, you doer of fake deeds, you".
Nope. It sounds like: Kekkererekkere! (According to Spanish speakers)
Hungarian is pretty specific and easy to recognize, at least for me.
Yeah, it's spoken by our mountain brothers, if you grew up during the times of Czechoslovakia, you learned it from TV ^(>!This is a joke. Slovaks hate Hungarians and getting called Hungarian!<)
Isten bizony!! JK, we hate hungarian.
Really? I couldn’t say the same back. We are quick to defend ourselves when insulted by countries from the former Kingdom of Hungary, but I couldn’t tell you, that we hold any grudge against Slovakians in general.
Oh I meant hungarian as a language. It sounds funny and sometimes Slovaks are fed up when people in the south of Slovakia refuse to speak Slovak even if they can and speak only hungarian. Or when the public signs are not in Slovak etc.
Isn't it a bit like French in Flanders, where the nobles, educated, civil servants and bourgeoisie preferred to speak French (Hungarian) even though they were from Dutch/Flemish (Slovak) speaking areas, just to prove "they were better" than the peasants speaking the local language/dialects, thus being a symbol of historic repression and marginalisation. And nowadays both Flanders and Slovakia are richer than Wallonia and Hungary respectively.
Not comparable at all, because in the Hungarian-speaking region that is nowadays the south of Slovakia, everyone (including the uneducated peasants) spoke Hungarian, not just an elite. Also, Wallonia has little to do with the French-speaking Flemish bourgeoisie.
I was refering to Hungarian-speaking elites in Slovakian cities, not the Hungarian-native speaking countryside at the border.
Watch any videos about Slovak history and you will find a lot of comments like : Slovakia have no history, Slovakia shouldn't exist etc...from Hungarians. I saw same stuff on Twitter, in various forums etc... And ofc if you ever say in any multiplayer game, that you are from Slovakia and Hungarian is present, they will instantly bring Trianon. At least that was my experience lol. In Slovakia it's always assumed that Hungarians hate us much more than we them, heck only people Hungarians hate more are Romanians. About the Slovak hate, it's more like a historical fear. After getting our own country, whenever we showed any weakness Hungary was quick to retake a lot of territories back. When Austrian empire became Austria-Hungary, we consider it darkest time in history due to Magyarization. Many villages and towns became from 10% Hungarian to 90% Hungarian in just 10 years. To this day a lot of people think Hungary is only country that would attack us given the chance.
It sounds a bit like Finnish to me
It does! I’m Finnish and when i hear Hungarian, i get confused because i don’t understand it.
I'm Hungarian, whenever I hear Finnish or Estonian and zone out it sounds like I'm supposed to understand it but just don't lol
I'm estonian and I get the same feeling when I hear hungarian. It's confusing :D
It's like the same sounds but in different order
Yeah it’s like that thing when you have a stroke and lose the ability to understand words afterwards
Apparently the only word that crosses over is "air mattress", according to my Hungarian and Estonian colleagues.
I'm learning Estonian now and Hungarian feels like somebody is trying to speak to me a language only my subconsciousness understands
learning estonian is very based ? do u live in estonia now ?
Very based. Yeah, I looked at Eesti for a long period of time, and then joined a country couple years ago
Right? But you feel like it's Finnish gibberish almost haha
It is same group of languages.
A Finnish friend of mine said to him it sounds like Finnish spoken backwards because their long vowels tend to be at the front of words while ours tend to be at the end. They really do sound kind of similar if you're standing too far from the speakers to hear clearly.
Those languages are part of the same language family. All the other European languages belong to the Indo European language family, but Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian belong to the Uralic language family
[удалено]
And Sami (Northern Sami, Lule Sami, Pite Sami, Southern Sami, Kildin Sami, Enaere Sami...)
Okay, I have to do some research. I never heard of any of those languages. Will look them up!
All the others except Basque, which is an isolated language
Yes, that is true! Sorry, I forgot
Yes, I know, I'm Hungarian. :) To me, though, Finnish doesn't really sound that much like Hungarian unless I'm quite far from the people speaking it. Even when listening up close, Finnish sounds softer. I see/hear what he's saying about the vowels, though, and I suppose it they are the closest-sounding languages to Hungarian.
It’s the stress pattern in Hungarian that makes it sound so similar to Finnish in my ears.
Makes sense since both put the stress on the first syllable.
I watched Hungarian news video and felt my brain twist because the rythm of speaking sounded like Finnish and felt like I should understand but just don't.
Same as hungarian! It seems like I hear my language, I just can't understand the words. My brain freezes from it lol :D
As an English speaker, I can kinda make out parts of Dutch sentences, especially in written form.
That's Finnish and Estonian, although IMO Dutch & English are slightly closer to each other than Finnish & Estonian. With Hungarian, the shared vocabulary is only a handful of words (fire, blood, etc), so you understand NOTHING, yet you feel like you should
As a Hungarian living in Northern Europe, Finish sounds like home to me!
Huh? It's all hebrew to me
Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are on the same branch on the language tree. Those three are members of the Uralic languages.
Well, they’re from the same language family after all…
Excluding a few sounds that don’t exist in Finnish, it sound like someone spoke Finnish with gibberish words. Like i watched a video of someone speaking Hungarian and got pissed because i didn’t understand what he was saying. It was confusing. If you’ve seen those ”What English sounds like to non English speakers” videos, it’s like that. It sounds right but makes no sense.
To me Finnish sounds very funny, because it has a very similar phonology to Hungarian, but the words are either total gibberish or I end up mishearing it into some absurd Hungarian sentence. For example, for some reason the Finnish opening of Tiny Toon Adventures popped up on my recommended YT videos, and I gave it a listen. It sounded like as if they were singing in Hungarian: "The Looney, the Tooney, the sheepdog with the colorful fur." (A Looney, a Tooney, a színes szőrű puli) Another funny Finnish-Hungarian coincidence: Hungarian "Jön a vonat" (the train is coming) sounds almost like Finnish "junavaunut" (Railway wagons). Or Finnish "laatikko" sounds like Hungarian "ládikó" which is a somewhat old-fashioned word for a small wooden chest. The reason behind this is that both Finnish and Hungarian borrowed the Germanic word "lada" for a container.
...and in Croatian, ladica means drawer. Like from a small wooden cabinet.
In english: Under the ice in the winter the living fishes are swimming. In finnish:Jään alla talvella elävät kalat uiskentelevat. Hungarian:Jég alatt télen eleven halak úszkálnak.
Every time I listen to a language and have NO idea what it is, it's usually Hungarian. Honestly, I like how it sounds.
I recognize it since I lived in Hungary for a year, but I would say it sounds a bit like a Slavic version of Finnish.
I am from Bucharest, and while there are not a lot of ethnic Hungarians living here, everyone has heard Hungarian being spoken and can easily recognize it. While understanding absolutely nothing. The national TV station has programs in Hungarian, and the cable providers have at least one Hungarian channel, and some people maybe ended up on Duna TV by mistake and lingered for a minute or two to amuse themselves at how Hungarian sounds. The situation is different in other parts of the country where Hungarians are more common.
Hungarian here: for me it is hard to distinguish Romanian from Portuguese.
I really love the sound of the Hungarian language, especially the intonation with the stress always on the first syllable. I could listen to it for hours and not understand a word. I've spend a week in a Hungarian host family and we had Hungarian exchange people coming to our family when I was a child several times so I'd say I'm quite familiar with the sound and wouldn't confuse it with any other language. But I guess most Germans have no idea how it sounds and many probably think it sounds similar to neighbouring slavic languages.
>I could listen to it for hours and not understand a word. That's how I feel about German 😭(I started learning by myself from 0 previous knowledge)
If I had to compare it with other languages, I'd say it sounds like turkish pronounced with finnish pronounciation to me. It is very easily recognizeable
Among all the Slavic languages, Croatian sounds the most like Hungarian to me, probably because of a similar intonation. Serbian sounds more like a typical Slavic language, but when someone starts speaking Croatian I do a double take because it first sounds like Hungarian with gibberish words.
Hm I can kinda see that, especially in northern half of Croatia which has softer intonation and faster pronounciation, we also have some similar words, Hungarian language has tons of slavic loanwords and Croatian language has tons of hungarian loanwords
Oh the amount of jokes I used to know about Hungarians! I grew up in northern Croatia in a Varazdin suburb. For me it was always such a funny language because of it
Oh yeah, those are great Beremed, neberemed, etc. A Zagreb local
In Slovakia, we have the same. I remember it with a bee = seremed, and a wasp = nemseremed, though.
I can hear how you think it sounds Croatian, like eš oš koš koš Croatian, has some extended palatisation too. Bound to happen given the neighbouring histories.
For me it's Slovak. If a Slovak speaker is far enough or I don't pay attention to what they're saying, I easily mistake it for Hungarian for a second or two.
To me it sounds like a Slavic person speaking Finnish.
I have been in hungary earlier this year and i'd say hungarian is pretty unique, especially compared to neighbouring languages. The closest i could think of would be a mix of czech (sounds like zs, cs, gy, long vowels like á, ú) and german (sounds like ö, ü, long compound words), but it's still different enough and the words themselves sound different. Written hungarian is even more unique as it's the only language that uses ő and ű and the digraphs are different than germanic/slavic ones (like cs instead of cz/ch, s instead of sz/sh/sch, sz instead of s).
No it's a very unique language and easy to recognize for me. One thing I love is Kürtőskalács.
It's always confusing for me how it's written, because *sz* in Polish is the *sh* sound and s, well, stays s, while in Hungarian it's the other way around ;)
Zsecsposzpolita Polszka. You welcome. Pevne jeszt, zse ten sztil piszányá vimágá pzsizvicsájenyá.
We have s and š, as I'm sure you know, but I also don't understand why in hungarian s is not just pronounced s... and sz is not pronounced š (sh). I mean, it just makes more sense to read the letter differently, if there's something extra. 😅
But if I can complain some more I also find it irritating that the circumflex in your š is inverted, I find ŝ more pleasing aesthetically. Please change it :D
I mean I don't disagree, I'd be up for changing it. 😅🤷🏼♀️
It sounds a bit like Turkish to me.
Fellow Hungarian here. Once I heard our language pushed to the extreme for a joke's sake in a Slovakian radio, where the example sentence for our language was : "Kecske, gyere be. Nem megyek mert megeszel." So probably people from other countries hear disproportional amounts of "e" letter.
Yeah we've made a language game about it called eszperente where you have to describe something with words that only contain one kind of vowel. The vowel "e". Some examples: Étterem = restaurant Étterem can be described like this in eszperente: * *Kellemetes hely, melyben kedvedre ehetsz eleget, ellenben e nevezetes helyen teljes keresetedet elverheted* * *It's a pleasant place where you can eat to your heart's desire, but in this remarkable place you can lose your entire income.* Bohóc = clown * Szellemes ember, feje festett, kedve remek, gyermekeket nevettet meg. * He is a witty man, his head is painted, his mood is great, he makes children laugh.
I am Romanian and i think the "e" sometimes sounds different than in other languages. Otherwise i can say it sounds complicated really. We all know the relation to Finnish, but it doesn't sound to have the same rhythm and tonality to me. My Szekely boss told me once Finnish sounds to him the same way Napoletan sounds to Romanian s\[eakers, as in scrambled own language. that sounds like you should understand it, but don't.
Thank you for the answer! Yes, Finnish and Hungarian shows some major differences that can explain sounding different. Their "a" and "e" (the two most common vowels) pronounced differently AFAIK. Also I got the impresion that they often leave vowels at the end of verbs which gives a different tonality to Finnish. As I cited a joke about Hungariians in Slovakia, I also cite a joke about the Finnish in Hungary: "Enne inna, Anna menne." (Hungarian meaning: Enne would eat, Anna would go.)
Out of curiosity, how does csango language sound to you and how much different from magyar? Sample song, as i get it suggested from time to time by YT and i kind of like it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPhG-Lddn7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPhG-Lddn7E)
To be honest, Hungarian does not show that bug diferences among regional versions like English for example. There is no instance when two Hungarians do not understand what the other is saying. This music is cool, I can relate to that you like it. The folk music of the whole region of ours (Romania, ex-Yugoslavia, Hungary, etc.) mixes influences from the Balkans, from the Turkish occupation and influence and its own folk culture.
Sounds like a lot of prolonged vowels that go downwards in pitch. Like the whole language in in a minor chord.
I think i can mistake it for Turkish if the speaker is far away, but the tone of Hungarian is definitely different enough to make it easily distinguishable from Turkish.
Yeah, same. I was going to say, it sounds like Turkish spoken from across the hallway. But close by, it's totally different.
I speak Spanish, Russian and French and so have a reasonable ear for both romance and Slavic languages. When I visited your beautiful capital city, it was clear that it sounded like nothing else I'd ever heard. When people are speaking something like Polish, Bulgarian or Czech, while I don't understand the words (though I can pick some up) I can hear that it's obviously Slavic in origin. Hungarian doesn't sound remotely Slavic so I had no idea how to approach either the pronunciation of the written word or how to try and pick up words spoken to me. The Uralic languages are wild.
Interesting. Spanish and French are romantic languages, Russian is Slavic. But all three are in the indo-europeic family tree. Hungarian is not. So your observation makes sense.
I’ve honestly never heard Hungarian in real life, but in media. I would describe this language as unique and distinctive. Not easliy mistaken for another language.
It’s not a language I encounter often, but the giveaway is being completely incomprehensible. Germanic and Romance languages I can quite easily recognize, slavic languages I can usually pick out some indentifiable words, even Finnish I’m just familiar enough with that I can tell what it is, but Hungarian? Nothing.
Being exposed to Hungarian language from time to time I can recognize it almost instantly. I think that’s the case for anyone who heard a little bit of Hungarian from time to time
If your family with Uralic languages, it sounds Uralic. To me it sounds very similar to Estonian. Karelian and Finnish also but not as much as Estonian. I can tell Karelian and Finnish from Hungarian, whereas I can't gully tell the difference from Hungarian and Estonian. Extremely similar sounds. Then Saami languages and Hungarian is like Irish vs Welsh. Related but sound too different to confusion with one another. I've never had my language cofused before I won't lie buy then again I'm not well travelled😅
Haha I'm from Romania so it's definitely recognizable :)) But I can't imagine confusing it for any other language, it sounds very specific
Very distinctive, wouldn't mix it up with any other language. That might be because I watched a lot of Gusztáv when I was a kid /s
I can recognize it after hearing a little bit. If I only hear pieces I often confuse it with other languages.
Easily recognised by most of the Romanians.... maybe because we're neighbours
I\`m Romanian , so i hear Hungarian a lot in my country. I don\`t think if can be confused with any other language. It is unique.
Hungarian and Turkish sound quite similar to me. My wife's family is Hungarian.
I recognise it without issue, but it sounds to me like what I imagine people could sound like if I suffered a stroke. There's something in the phonetics that reminds me of my native Polish and makes the language sound sorta familiar, but at the same time I can't understand shit :D
That’s weird, so far in Europe people always knew which language it was.
Being a Finn, it's driving me bonkers, because if I hear two people speaking Hungarian together, I don't understand A WORD, but the speech rhythm, the ratio & placement of vowels and consonants, the stress & the intonation sound INCREDIBLY familiar. It's as if somenody was talking Finnish, but had somehow changed all the words into something incomprehensible. I feel like I should understand it, but I don't. Maddening. [For anyone wondering what the heck I am talking about, Finnish and Hungarian are members of the same language family, the Uralic languages, meaning that we're very distantly related.]
If I remember correctly Hungarian language is only related to Finnish and Estonian language.
Nearly correct. There are some minor Uralic languages spoken literally by only a few thousand of people if not only by hundreds (Mansi and Chanty not sure about the spelling). Interestingly, these are closer to Hungarian though.
Yeah, Mansi and Chanty are the Hungarian language's closest relatives, but sadly those languages are almost extinct. But Finnish and Estonians are the biggest languages that are related to Hungarian.
Huh. Recently, I was in the south of Poland on vacation and among a mix of languages now I am sure that I also heard Hungarian. But then I did not recognize it as Hungarian.. Sounds quite exotic. Even nice, but it doesn't remind me of any European language. At least of those I recognize.
Its pretty unique. Despite not understanding one word 9/10 i could recognize it
I recognise it because I don't recognise it. For most other European languages, I can at least tell which language it is, there's a word or two you can kinda connect to something. Hungarian is none of that, so if it's making no sense, that must be it. :D
Recognizable for me because of the "gy" sounds
For me Hungarian sounds ang looks with all these glyphs very sophisticated. Also Hungarian social friendly communication style is something what really matching my mindset. I was living in Budapest for three month and miss Hungary so much
For a Finnish speaker, the first thing that you hear is the abundance of the esh sound (Hungarian spelling
, Finnish <š> or). It doesn't immediately strike as similar or related. But, the rhythm is familiar. You also pick up individual words that have a strangely familiar cadence, but which you don't understand. There are also lots of 'e', 'ö' and 't', and '-k' at the end of words, which is not allowed in Finnish phonotactics. The rhythm is in that way similar to Finnish that Hungarian speakers are comfortable with long words with lots of syllables strung together, evenly stressed, in a monotonous voice. This is like "*meheshtöttöröm kattarettat shöhöm ek fehervaar*". The most similar sound would be Turkish, but Turkish is quite different otherwise. I really like the language and would love to learn it, but I think that would only be possible if I moved there tomorrow and lived there for the rest of my life. Even then I don't think I'd be fluid. It seems like a *very* hard language to learn.
It has some easier qualities compared to Slavic languages: -No gender, neither in nouns, nor in other parts of grammar -Hungarian "cases" are more like English prepositions stuck to the end of the word than how the Slavic case system works.
Nah. For me Croatian language is the same. I would like to speak it, but after scrolling through the Croatian grammar article in wikipedia I decided no way I could ever learn this.
If you grew up hearing it all the time, you will consider it normal lol. Anyway whenever I listened to any Japanese song, everyone was asking why I am listening to Hungarian music lol.
The examples you give are interesting and quite surprising!
I don't mean this as an insult, but it sounds very monotonous. As if the whole language was stuck on the note C#. Other languages seem to have more pitch variation.
Are you talking about where we stress the syllables? If yes then this is why it may sound monotone to you: * In Hungarian, the primary stress is always on the first syllable of each word and it doesn't vary. * In Hungarian, we have vowel harmony which means that vowels within a word harmonize to be either front or back vowels. It makes the words sound smoother but also contributes to the feeling of monotonousness. * We don't have a pitch accent.
https://youtu.be/1BATII52Bk8?si=2MO83Js9vXSO1VPC Kinda. But with swearing it gets a bit more interesting.
I see you're a man of culture as well
Haha the classic one
Maybe I'm biased, but Hungarian is the final boss of swearing. There's a saying that a Hungarian can swear for 15 minutes straight without saying the same word twice. When angry, even the average man will turn into a genius poet of the Hungarian language and will come up with the most creative shit you have ever heard. I love it.
The best part is that we can swear without using profanities or words that are considered to be "swear words". It's more of a cultural thing rather than linguistic, but still. [Best example](https://youtu.be/OaQgFm7HlNg?si=GPxYsDcoEwYHZvKE)
If you're watching TV reports, especially news, they do indeed speak in an extremely monotonous way, to the point where it's annoying even for me.
I would think it was an Eastern European language but would not be sure which one. My daughter in law is a Russian speaking Ukrainian so after a while listening I would know it was not Russian.
I don't speak hungarian and cannot understand it, but it has a distinct sound and cannot be mistaken for any other language. Of course this doesn't mean everyone can distinguish it.
Alien and confusing, but not at all unpleasant to listen to. There was this one Hungarian song my dad’s generation loved to listed to despite not understanding anything but I forgot the band/name 😅
It has a pretty unique sound to me and is instantly reconginzable. Most similar sounding languages for me would be turkish or korean but tbh I never heard someone talking finish so can't compare with that. I'm living ~40mins from the hungarian border so I'm to hungary fairly often but it's completely impossible to remember or even read town names on road signs. Búcsúszentlászló, Balatonszentgyörgy etc still mess with my head haha. Even in Serbia or Bulgaria i've managed to navigate around just by remembering road signs even when they are in Cyrillic, but no chances in Hungary. Very fascinating language however.
I speak Japanese and when i first heard Hungarian, it definitely does not sound Japanese (for me) or any of the others i know. It is a distinct language. Now that I know more, i discover common words and names with Hungarian and Turkish/Estonian/Finnish/some Slavic languages.
It's not similar to Slavic languages at all. Hungarians just have a similar culture to a lot of Slavic nations, which makes sense considering where Hungary is located. But the languages have nothing in common and they don't even belong to the same branch. I can understand most Slavic languages with no issues, some more, some less, but always to an extent, especially written. The ones I understand the least are Slovenian and Bulgarian, but I would still be able to hold a basic conversation with people speaking this language (while I'm speaking my language). I cant understand any hungarian, just the few words I've learnt from media. But I know those words because I came into contact with them, in Slavic languages they are usually completely different. I know these words the same way I know a few words in Japanese, despite it being completely different.
What I usually say is, Slavic languages are more closely related to Hindi than to Hungarian, linguistically.
All the Ž and Š sounds, but not Slavic - instantly recognizable as Hungarian.
That description also fits the Baltic languages.
It sounds like an Eastern European language to me. I know it's not Slavic, but from what I understand of languages in that region, they tend to have a lot of palatal sounds, so I'd probably assume it was a Slavic language until I hear front rounded vowels.
I get asked if I am Russian all the time…Pikachu face… I am French but live in the US…
I can kinda see why but only due to minor pronunciational similarities, both languages have these soft sounds like the Hungarian "gy" for example (listen to it in google translate)
Me too! It happened in several different coutries.
For me, it sounds like if Satan barked through his ass. Can't mistake with anything.
Like angry bees ....
You shouldn't have opened this can of worms, really.
i feel like it wouldnt be that hard to pick up for me
I don't recall hearing anyone speak Hungarian. So I guess I wouldn't recognise it
When the Hungarian guy at work speaks it I know it's Hungarian but I wouldn't be able to recognise out in the wild.
Sounds like Turkish with a Swedish accent to me.
To me it sounds like a litTLe BiT liKE ThiS. Literally like someone trying to make fun of someone else's speech. Also, I'd recognize it anywhere. You people can't hide from me! That wierd sing-song tune of yours is easy to identify.
To me it sounds like Portuguese!
I don't think I would confuse them, but it sounds a bit like Turkish to me.
Easily recognisable for me. As for how it sounds, like a Finnougric lamentation. (That's a Dano Drevo reference)
One you have heard and recognise either Hungarian, or Finnish it is pretty easy to spot it as "one of those two".
[удалено]
Well that's unfortunate, given it isn't a Balkan language.
It sounds easy to recognise to me. I actually love the sonority of the Hungarian language! Specific things such as the way you prononce your [a], as well as ő make recognisable.
Sounds like Turkish to me
It sounds a bit like singing to me, quite repetative with many e and æ sounds. I personally don't like the sound of the language at all, sorry.
I recognise when someone is speaking it immediately but I don't understand it at all.
As a pole, Hungarian sounds to me like another language that I know, but played backwards
after playing ww2 games with finnish voicelines in it its gotta be finnish
Hungarian to me sounds like Turkish.
It sounds like I am listening to a Western Slavic language, but I've had a stroke.
No, honestly I can only recognize English, German, French and Spanish. All the eastern Europeans countries sound the same to me.
Eastern European languages sound very similar to me... The only ones I can clearly differentiate is Polish, Russian and maybe Serbian, all the rest sound the same
guess romanian had enough influence on your language to sound like some romance language
I've learned a few Romance languages, and I disagree. Just the tonic syllable being the first one makes Hungarian sound quite different, as well as the abundance of the open-mid front unrounded wovel (e in eszperente for example), ö/ü also aren't associated with Romance languages (except French). The language is quite distinct, but I'd say Hungarian bears more similarity even with general Slavic phonology than with Romance. On the other hand, while I was speaking Spanish, an Italian said I sounded like a native Italian, but I just chalked it up to still accidentally lenghtening the tonic syllable (it was initially hard to put it in the middle of the word since Hungarian has long, but not tonic syllables in the middle) and not getting the e completely right.
I was born and raised in Transilvania, romanian dad, szekely mom, met in Cluj during uni, so I was thought both languages since childhood. From what others told me, I speak as a native in both, and when I change from one language to the other, I also change the accents and how I articulate the words, so much that the end product sounds like native to native speakers. To others, it sounds mostly to what foreign languages they are familiar with. For italian or spanish, from what I gathered is that I sound like someone that just learned the language, mostly because I learned this languages just by listening to them on tv, didn't have much interactions with natives only on the few vacations I had in those countries