language fact file: Hungary

A language native to: Hungary

Number of native speakers: 13 million

Learn some: There are several greetings but you can keep it simple with ‘szia’, pronounced ‘see-ya’, which can be ‘hi’ or ‘bye’. If you want to thank someone, it’s köszönöm, pronounced ‘kuh-suh-nuhm’.

Fast facts:

The Hungarian language is called Magyar. Its roots are not Slavic or Indo-European, but Uralic, which means that it has more in common with Finnish and Estonian languages than those of its neighbouring countries.

Magyar is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn: it has approximately 26 cases, 14 vowel sounds, 44 letters and a flexible word order system that can be very confusing!

The earliest recorded example of Magyar was found in Canada and is thought to date back to 1000AD, meaning that a Hungarian person arrived in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus.