The Hungarian alphabet and pronunciation

Hungarian is spelled almost exactly as it is pronounced: once you know what each of the 44 letters stands for, you can read any word aloud correctly, even one you have never seen. The catch is that several letters do not mean what an English reader expects (s is "sh", sz is "s", c is "ts"), and that length, both of vowels and of consonants, changes the meaning of words.

The 44 letters at a glance

The official alphabet, as laid down in A magyar helyesírás szabályai, has 44 letters. Eight of them are written with two characters (digraphs) and one with three (a trigraph), but each counts as a single letter and stands for a single sound:

a á b c cs d dz dzs e é f g gy h i í j k l ly m n ny o ó ö ő p q r s sz t ty u ú ü ű v w x y z zs

• 14 vowel letters: seven short and long pairs, a/á, e/é, i/í, o/ó, ö/ő, u/ú, ü/ű.
• 9 multi-character letters: cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs.
• 4 "foreign" letters: q, w, x, y appear mainly in loanwords and names (taxi, whisky). The letter y is also part of gy, ly, ny, ty and appears as an "i" sound in old family names such as Kölcsey.

Vowels: seven pairs, fourteen sounds

Hungarian vowels are "pure": they do not glide the way English vowels in go or day do. Hold the mouth still for the whole vowel. Long vowels are roughly twice as long as short ones and are never reduced to a neutral "uh", even in unstressed syllables.

Two pairs differ in quality as well as length. Short a is a rounded back vowel, long á is an open unrounded one, so a and á sound like two different vowels to English ears. Likewise short e is open, long é is closer. In the other five pairs the quality is nearly the same and the main difference is duration.

How the vowels group into back and front sets matters for almost every suffix you will ever add; that is covered in vowel harmony.

Vowel length changes meaning: minimal pairs

Long and short vowels are separate phonemes, not optional variants. Swapping one for the other gives you a different word, so train your ear with minimal pairs:

Consonants and the digraphs

Most consonants sound roughly as in English: b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, t, v, z. Two differences: p, t, k are not aspirated (no puff of air as in English pin), and t, d, n are made with the tongue against the teeth. The letters below are where English readers go wrong.

The letters j and ly are pronounced the same. The spelling with ly is historical and has to be learned word by word: hely (place), folyó (river), király (king), gólya (stork), but baj (trouble), vaj (butter).

A final h after a vowel is silent in a handful of words: méh (bee) sounds like mé, cseh (Czech) like cse.

Double consonants are long consonants

A doubled consonant letter is not a spelling habit as in English butter: it is a genuinely longer sound, held for about twice as long. Like vowel length, it distinguishes words:

• tol / toll pushes / feather, pen
• hal / hall fish / hears
• szál / száll thread / flies, rises
• kasza / kassza scythe / cash register
• megy / meggy goes / sour cherry

When a digraph is long, only its first character is doubled: asszony (woman, sz + sz), meggy, könnyű (easy), hattyú (swan), rizzsel (with rice). The exception is a compound boundary, where the full digraphs are kept for clarity: jegygyűrű (engagement ring, jegy + gyűrű).

Stress always falls on the first syllable

Hungarian word stress is fixed: the first syllable, always, regardless of word length or origin. BU-da-pest, KÖ-szö-nöm (thank you), E-gész-sé-ged-re (cheers), MEG-ér-ke-zik (arrives, with the stress on the verbal prefix). Loanwords are re-stressed too: IN-for-ma-ti-ka, KA-me-ra.

Some practical consequences:

• The articles a, az and egy are normally unstressed and lean on the following word.
• In a sentence, the element in focus position carries the strongest stress, and the verb after it loses its stress.
• Yes/no questions have a distinctive rise-fall melody: the pitch rises on the second-to-last syllable and falls on the last, as in Beszélsz angolul? (Do you speak English?), with the peak on -go-. A rising end, as in English, sounds foreign.

Alphabetical order quirks

Because digraphs are single letters, Hungarian dictionaries sort them as units. This surprises learners looking words up:

• All words beginning with c come before all words beginning with cs: cukor precedes csak.
• n words finish before ny words begin: nyúl (rabbit) comes after nulla (zero). The same holds for g/gy, l/ly, s/sz, t/ty, z/zs and d/dz/dzs.
• Short and long vowels are treated as the same letter for sorting (a = á, o = ó, ö = ő and so on). Length only decides between words that are otherwise identical, and the short one comes first: kor, then kór.
• But o and ö, or u and ü, are different letters: every o word precedes every ö word.

Spelling versus speech: assimilation

Hungarian spelling follows the principle of morphology as well as sound (each stem and suffix tends to keep its written shape, see how Hungarian words are built), so some sound changes at morpheme boundaries are written and others are not. Knowing which is which explains many "exceptions".

Written assimilation: -val/-vel and -vá/-vé

The v of the instrumental -val/-vel and of the translative -vá/-vé turns into a copy of a preceding consonant, and the spelling shows it:

• busz + val → busszal by bus
• kéz + vel → kézzel by hand
• Péter + vel → Péterrel with Péter
• ló + val → lóval with a horse (after a vowel, v stays)

Unwritten assimilation: voicing

When two obstruents meet, the second decides whether both are voiced or voiceless. This happens in speech only; the spelling keeps each morpheme intact.

• népdal folk song, said [neːbdɒl]
• kútban in the well, said [kuːdbɒn]
• vízpart waterside, said [viːspɒrt]
• háztól from the house, said [haːstoːl]

Two special cases: h never triggers voicing, and v can be devoiced but does not voice the consonant before it, so hatvan (sixty) keeps its [t].

Other unwritten changes

• látja sees it, said like "láttya" [laːcːɒ] (t + j)
• adja gives it, said like "aggya" [ɒɟːɒ] (d + j)
• barátság friendship, said like "baráccság" (t + s)
• egészség health, said like "egésség" (sz + s)
• színpad stage, said [siːmpɒd] (n before p becomes m)

These patterns matter most in verb forms such as látja, tudja, adja, which you will meet constantly in the definite conjugation.

Common pronunciation pitfalls for English speakers

The errors below are the ones English speakers make most predictably, because each one comes from reading Hungarian letters with English habits. For grammar-level slips, see common mistakes, and for a broader contrast of the two sound systems, Hungarian vs English.

1. Reading s as [s]. Budapest ends in "-pesht", Liszt is "list". Memory trick: Hungarian swapped them; the one-letter s is the "sh" sound, the two-letter sz is plain "s". The swap is not trivial: Kérek egy sört is "A beer, please", while the same sentence with szőrt asks for body hair.
2. Splitting gy, ty, ny into two sounds. magyar is not "mag-yar"; gy is one palatal stop, made with the middle of the tongue against the hard palate. The same holds for ty (kutya) and ny (anya, mother).
3. Pronouncing short a like English "a". a is closer to the "o" of British hot; apa (father) is not "apper".
4. Ignoring length. kerek versus kerék, hal versus hall: the words differ only in length.
5. Gliding é and ó. kép is not English cape, and jó does not end in "-ow". Keep the tongue still.
6. Reading c as k. cica (kitty) is "tsitsa", cukor is "tsukor".
7. Anglicising old family names. Historical spellings survive in names: cz = c, ch = cs (Széchenyi), th = t and y after a consonant = i. Kossuth is said "Koshut".

Sources and further reading

• Péter Siptár and Miklós Törkenczy, The Phonology of Hungarian (Oxford University Press, 2000), on the vowel system, length and assimilation
• Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, A magyar helyesírás szabályai (12th ed., Akadémiai Kiadó, 2015), on the alphabet, long digraphs and alphabetical order
• Carol H. Rounds, Hungarian: An Essential Grammar (2nd ed., Routledge, 2009), pronunciation chapter
• István Kenesei, Robert M. Vago and Anna Fenyvesi, Hungarian (Descriptive Grammars series, Routledge, 1998), phonology section

Frequently asked questions