Station
identification: "Kossuth Radio, Budapest" The language of Hungary.
Hungarian is related to Finnish . Both Finnish and Hungarian place a stress on the first syllable of each word.
Hungarian has a characteristic o sound which does not occur in Finnish, there is also no sh or ch sound in Finnish.
Like all languages of the Finno-Ugric group, Hungarian is agglutinative (words are constructed from a variety of components). Words typically consist of a stem that is followed by one or more suffixes. Most suffixes are subject to rules of vowel harmony: a stem that contains a back vowel (such as á ) will require suffixes with back vowels (hát, "back"; hátunk , "our back"; háton, "on one's back"), and a stem that contains a front vowel will require suffixes with front vowels (hét, "week"; hétünk, "our week"; héten , "during … week").
The Hungarian alphabet has the digraphs sz, cs, zs, ty, gy, and ny (pronounced approximately like English s, ch, s as in "leis ure," t as in "tune," das in "dune," and n as in "on ion," respectively); c and s are like English tsand sh. Otherwise, the pronunciation of the consonants is similar to that of Latin.
The languages most closely related to Hungarian are Vogul and Ostyak, spoken near the Ob River in Western Siberia. Proto-Hungarian separated from related languages more than 2000 years ago and gradually migrated West, reaching its present location about AD 900. As it migrated, Hungarian acquired many borrowings (mostly from Turkic languages and from Iranian languages spoken in or near the Caucasus). After AD 900 a number of words were borrowed from some Italic languages, from Slavic, from Ottoman-Turkish, and from German. The basic stock of ordinary words, however, is Finno-Ugric. Hungarian acquired many technical terms during the 19th century.
Station
identification: "Kossuth Radio, Budapest"
| Name | Where spoken | Language Family | How many (000s) |
| Hungarian (Magyar) | Hungary, Romania, and nearby areas | Uralic (Fino-Ugric) | 13.5-14m |
Table source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, David Ctystal, Cambridge University Press
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