• Why Study Hungarian?
• Programs
• Study Elsewhere Opportunities
• FAQs

Why Study Hungarian?

• Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian. It is the largest member of the Finno-Ugric family of languages, spoken by about 10 million people in Hungary and 4.5 million in countries adjacent to Hungary and around the world. Hungarian is one of the official languages of the European Union. As a non-Indo-European language, it has some special features which distinguish it from most languages in Europe.
• The history of Hungary goes back more than a thousand years. The Kingdom of Hungary was established in the year 1000 AD in the Carpathian Basin, and was closely connected to the adoption of Roman Christianity.
• From the 16th century Hungary confronted the western expansion of the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire and in the 17th century it became part of the Habsburg Monarchy, later to become the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a result of its geographical location in Central-Europe, Hungary integrated cultures from the East and West alike.
• The recent past of the country anticipates a very promising future: Hungary became a sovereign Republic in 1989, and in 2004 it joined the European Union. As a medium-sized Member State of the EU, Hungary has been taking part in the shaping of the cultural, political and economic life of Europe.
• Hungary has been the birthplace of a number of outstanding artists and scientists, including the composers Ferenc Liszt, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, the mathematician János Neumann, the physicist Ede Teller; and Nobel laureates, such as the biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, the chemist György Oláh, the physicist Jenő Wigner and the writer Imre Kertész.
• Endowed with lots of natural beauty and a range of fascinating cities steeped in hundreds of years of history, Hungary is a country whose culture and language are well worth studying.

Programs

• Visit the Hungarian Studies program for more information.
• Consult the A&S calendar for specific course offerings.

Study Elsewhere Opportunities

• There are many possibilities for in-country study and work. The centre can advise you on all different types of arrangements.

FAQs

1. Which areas of Hungarian culture are taught at the University of Toronto?
   Hungarian courses offer a wide range of topics, from literature through cinema to folklore, ethnography and language. For the specific courses currently offered, please check the undergraduate and graduate timetables.
2. I have heard that Hungarian is the most difficult language to learn. Is that true?
   No, especially considering that the question implies that there are easy and hard languages. In reality, all languages take time and effort to learn. Hungarian is not the most difficult language, at least if we can believe the anecdote about the Italian Cardinal, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a great polyglot. When Mezzofanti was asked which language was the most difficult to learn, he answered, “Chinese, definitely Chinese; I had to learn it for six whole weeks!” Of course, this does not mean, however, that you can learn Hungarian in less than six weeks.
3. Which are the most peculiar features of the Hungarian language?
   It is an agglutinative language, which means that a series of suffixes can be “glued” to the end of words. In Hungarian the stress always falls on the first syllable of words and the word order is very flexible. Hungarian does not have grammatical genders (for example, the pronoun ő means he, she and even it) and most verbs can express whether the object is definite or indefinite (for example "Hallok means “I can hear" (generally, or something not specific), whereas "Hallom" means “I can hear it”). An interesting feature of the language is that in Hungarian the surname comes first and the given name second; thus, in Hungary, Bela Bartok is known as Bartók Béla, and Franz Liszt as Liszt Ferenc.
4. How old is the Hungarian language?
   Linguists believe that the separation of the Hungarian language and the so called Ob-Ugrian languages (Vogul and Ostyak) took place between 1000 and 500 BC, that is about 2500-3000 years ago. In the course of its history, however, Hungarian came into contact with a number of languages, which had an impact on its development.
5. Is it hard to learn the alphabet?
   No! Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet with some additional “accented” letters, such as á, é, í, ó, etc, which you can learn very fast; moreover, the Hungarian writing system is largely phonetic. That is, if you learn how to pronounce the individual letters, you can easily read out words and sentences.
6. Are there awards and endowments available to students of Hungarian at the University of Toronto?
   Yes, there are several forms of recognition and support, including the Hungarian Helicon Foundation Award, the Laszlo T. Duska Memorial Fellowship and the Rakoczi Prize.