Hungarian Letters & Accents

The standard Hungarian alphabet has 40 letters: 22 unaccented single-character letters, nine accented vowels (á é í ó ö ő ú ü ű) and nine letters written with two or three characters: cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs. The extended 44-letter form adds Q, W, X and Y mainly for foreign words and old family names; y is rare on its own but appears in gy, ly, ny and ty.

The two-character letters count as single letters. In a Hungarian dictionary cs words have their own section after c, and sz comes after s, so szép (beautiful) is listed after sült (roasted). When such a letter is doubled, only its first character is written twice: asszony (woman), meggy (sour cherry), hosszú (long).

Hungarian spelling is close to phonetic, but a few values surprise English readers. s is the sh of ship and sz is the plain s, which is why Budapest is said Budapesht. c is ts, cs is ch, zs is the s of measure, j and ly are both the y of yes, ny is the ny of canyon, and gy and ty are a soft d and t, close to the d of British dew and the t of tune.

Hungarian accents on letters: acute, umlaut and the double acute ő ű

The acute accent on á é í ó ú marks a long vowel. It is not a stress mark: Hungarian stresses the first syllable of every word, wherever the accents fall. Length alone can change the word: kor is age and kór disease, kerek is round and kerék wheel. With a and e the accent changes the sound too: plain a is a short rounded vowel, close to the o of British hot, while á is a long open ah; e is the short e of bet and é a long closed ay without the glide.

The umlaut (two dots, the diaeresis) on ö and ü gives the front vowels of German or of French peu and tu. They are full letters, not decorated o and u: sor is a row and sör is beer, kör is a circle and kor age.

The double acute, two slanted strokes, is the long version of the umlaut: ő is a long ö and ű a long ü. öt means five and őt him or her; tör means breaks and tőr dagger. Hungarian is practically the only language that writes ő and ű, so they are letters that some fonts and keyboards leave out. Writing õ or ô for ő, or û for ű, is a substitute from the days when Western code pages had no room for them; in modern text it is a mistake.

The vowels also follow vowel harmony: endings change to match the vowels of the word. házban is in the house but kertben in the garden, and the ending meaning to has three forms: házhoz, kerthez, földhöz. Getting ö and ü right is part of getting the grammar right.

Hungarian quotation marks and punctuation: „ ” » «

Hungarian opens a quotation low and closes it high with the mark that curls the other way: „Jó napot!” The closing mark is ” (the English closing quote), not the “ that German and Czech use, so „…” is the pair to copy. A quotation inside a quotation uses inward-pointing chevrons: „Azt mondta: »gyere«, és elment.”

The dash between clauses, the gondolatjel, is a spaced en dash –; the same dash joins place names, as in Budapest–Bécs (Vienna). Numbers follow European custom, with a decimal comma (3,14) and a space between thousands (1 000 000).

Dates run from the largest unit to the smallest, each number followed by a full stop: 2026. október 21. or 2026. 10. 21. Names do the same: the family name comes first, so the composer is Bartók Béla and the inventor of the cube Rubik Ernő. Prices take Ft (forint) after the number, 1 500 Ft; the forint has no symbol of its own in Unicode.

How to type Hungarian letters on a keyboard

Hungarian keyboard layout: it is QWERTZ (Y and Z swap places) and every accented letter has its own key. The key left of 1 gives 0, and the three keys after 9 give ö ü ó; ő ú sit right of P, é á ű right of L, and í is on the extra key beside left Shift. Windows also offers a Hungarian 101-key version for keyboards that lack that extra key. Add it under Settings → Time & language → Language & region.

Windows without the Hungarian layout: hold Alt and type on the number pad: á 0225, é 0233, í 0237, ó 0243, ö 0246, ú 0250, ü 0252; Á 0193, É 0201, Í 0205, Ó 0211, Ö 0214, Ú 0218, Ü 0220. ő and ű have no Alt+0 code on Western Windows; in Word type the hex code and press Alt+X: ő 0151, Ő 0150, ű 0171, Ű 0170. The US-International layout gives the acute and umlaut vowels (' then a vowel, " then a vowel) but not ő or ű.

Mac: on the standard layout, Option + E then a vowel gives á é í ó ú, and Option + U then o or u gives ö ü. For ő and ű add the Hungarian input source in System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources. Phones: add the Hungarian keyboard in Gboard or the iPhone keyboard settings, then long-press o or u to choose ó ö ő or ú ü ű; the English keyboards do not offer ő and ű. HTML: ő Ő ű Ű for ő Ő ű Ű, á ö ü and the like for the rest, or numeric codes such as ő for ő. LaTeX: \H{o} and \H{u} give ő and ű; LaTeX calls the double acute the Hungarian umlaut.

Hungarian runes: the Old Hungarian script (rovás)

Before and alongside the Latin alphabet, Hungarians wrote with rovás, the Old Hungarian or Székely-Hungarian script. Its name comes from róni, to carve: the letters were notched into wooden sticks, so they are made of straight strokes, and the text runs from right to left. It survived longest among the Székely people of Transylvania; the best-known sources include the Nikolsburg alphabet, dated around 1500, and the 1598 Rudimenta of János Telegdi, which is why two letters come in a Nikolsburg and a Rudimenta form.

Unicode added the script in 2015 (version 8.0) in the block U+10C80–U+10CFF, with 51 letters in capital and small forms and six numerals, all of them on this page to copy. Most fonts do not include them; if you see empty boxes, install a rovás font such as Noto Sans Old Hungarian. Rovás has a lively revival: it appears on village name signs, in tattoos and on souvenirs, and it is taught in clubs and summer camps.

Where Hungarian is spoken, and the languages related to it

CLDR estimates about 12.3 million Hungarian speakers, about 9.9 million of them in Hungary 🇭🇺. The rest live mostly in the neighbouring countries, in towns that ended up outside Hungary when the borders were redrawn after the First World War: about 1.2 million in Romania 🇷🇴 (Transylvania), about 610,000 in Slovakia 🇸🇰, about 320,000 in Serbia 🇷🇸, where Hungarian is an official language of Vojvodina, about 130,000 in Ukraine 🇺🇦 (Transcarpathia), and smaller communities in Austria 🇦🇹 (Burgenland) and Slovenia 🇸🇮, where it is co-official in parts of Prekmurje. Emigrant communities live in Israel, Canada and the United States. Each country has its own collection of flags, emoji and symbols.

Hungarian is not an Indo-European language like its neighbours. It belongs to the Uralic family, and its closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, spoken in western Siberia. Finnish and Estonian are distant cousins; Finnish shares ö with Hungarian and Estonian shares ö and ü (see the Finnish and Estonian collections). The German collection has ö and ü too, but not ő and ű, and the neighbouring Slovak and Romanian collections show how different the letters next door are: ä ô ľ in Slovak, ă â î ș ț in Romanian.