ABSTRACT
Hungarian (native name magyar) is the only Uralic language spoken in central Europe. Hungarian has a total of about 14 million native speakers, with over 10 million in Hungary, about one and a half million in Rumania, and smaller numbers in other neighbouring countries and elsewhere, mainly in the USA and Canada. Because it is a Uralic language, Hungarian is typologically unlike the majority of
European languages. But paradoxically, Hungarian is also atypical among the Uralic family. It is by far the largest, disproportionately so, in the sense that more than half of all speakers of Uralic languages speak Hungarian. It has both a rich vocalism (14-15 vowels) and a rich inventory of voiced/voiceless oppositions in its consonantism (which includes four affricates). Most of its inflectional morphemes are innovations. Its syntax boasts an impressive set of coordinating conjunctions. The array of foreign elements in its lexicon rivals that of Gypsy (Romany). Unlike Finnish, Hungarian has no close relatives; the Ob-Ugric languages, traditionally bundled together with Hungarian into the Ugric subgroup of the Uralic family, are radically different from Hungarian in their phonology, syntax and vocabulary. This singular character is due to one decisive difference: migration by the Proto-
Hungarians, first southward from the Uralic Urheimat into the maelstrom of cultures in the South Russian steppe, then westward into the heart of Roman Christian Europe. This rudimentary sketch outlines only a few of the more salient features of Hungarian
grammar and lexicon. In order to compress the presentation without sacrificing accuracy of detail, the following typographic conventions have been observed: suffixes are written to the right of a hyphen (-) if inflectional, of an equals sign (=) if derivational. A double equals sign (= =) marks a coverb to its left.
