Polish and Hungarian: similar or really different languages?

As a native Polish speaker who teaches the Polish language, I sometimes get asked if Polish and Hungarian are similar languages.

The question makes sense: Hungary and Poland, though not neighboring countries, are geographically very close. They are less than 200 miles away from each other.

They are separated by another central European country, Slovakia which is right between them. Slovakia shares its northern border with Poland, and its southern border with Hungary.

Perhaps surprisingly given the geographic proximity between Hungary and Poland, their languages (Hungarian and Polish) are linguistically very far apart.

In fact, Polish and Hungarian belong to two entirely different language families:

• Polish belongs to the family of Slavic languages, alongside Russian, Serbian, Czech, and several others.
• Hungarian is a member of the Uralic group of languages, together with Finnish and Estonian

Despite being very different languages, Polish and Hungarian do surprisingly have some things in common.

​In the world of linguistics, there is no such thing as a perfectly isolated language. All languages in the world have evolved and have been influenced by other languages.

Some basics on the Polish and Hungarian languages

Both Polish and Hungarian are among the 24 official languages of the European Union.

• The Polish language (called “polski”) is spoken by over 50 million people
• The Hungarian language (called “magyar”) is spoken by over 13 million people

Both the Hungarian alphabet and the Polish alphabet are based on the same Latin alphabet (a,b,c.. ) that we use in English, but each of these languages has additional letters which are not found in English.

Some of the additional letters in the Polish alphabet are:

• an 'L' with stroke (Ł)
• letters with a hook (called an "ogonek") under them (ą, ę). This might remind some of us of the cedilla (ç) which is found in French and Portuguese, but it is shaped differently
• a letter with a dot over it (called "kropka") (ż)

Unlike Hungarian, Polish has many consonant clusters. These series of many consonants which are not separated by vowels make the pronunciation of some Polish words quite challenging for non-native speakers. For example:

• chrząszcz (meaning: beetle)
• brzęczeć (meaning: buzz)
• diabeł tkwi w szczegółach (“the devil’s in the details”)

For more examples of Polish words and their pronunciation, see this article on Polish expressions and phrases.

Some of the additional letters in the Hungarian alphabet are:

• letters with double acute accents (ő, ű)
• letter with an umlaut (ö, ü)

Just because there are few consonant clusters in Hungarian, doesn't mean that it is a language with an easy pronunciation. Here are some basic Hungarian phrases with audio:

• Üdvözöljük Budapesten (welcome to Budapest)
• jöjjön vissza hamarosan! (come back soon!)

One similarity between Polish and Hungarian is that they both feature among the languages with the most grammatical cases.

As anglophones, many of us are not very familiar with the concept of grammatical cases. This is because grammatical cases are not a big topic in English, since English has largely done away with markers of grammatical cases.

English grammatical cases are still visible in some places, for example in the way that pronouns change forms according to their grammatical function in the sentence:

• "who" when it is the subject of a verb (the 'nominative' case)
• "whom" when it is the object in the sentence (the 'accusative' case)
• "whose" when it is used to indicate ownership (the 'possessive' case)

In both Polish and Hungarian, grammatical cases are very much present, unlike in English. Polish has 7 grammatical cases, and Hungarian has 18.

To put that in perspective, consider how many language learners find it challenging to deal with the 4 grammatical cases in German.

The Origins of the Hungarian Language

To understand the origin of the Hungarian language, it helps to know a little bit about the history of the Hungarians and their ancestors.

The Ugric people (the Hungarian ancestors) separated from the Finno-Ugric tribes in the second millennium BC. The term "Ugric" comes from the Russian term "у́гры" (úgry), denoting indigenous people dwelling east of the Urals (the Urals are a mountain range in western Russia)

This explains why among the languages most closely related to Hungarian are the Khanity and Mansi languages, which are the languages of people inhabiting Siberia.

Languages that have influenced Hungarian

The Hungarian language has been heavily influenced by the Turkish, Slavic, and Germanic languages over the centuries. Around the 7th century CE, the Ugric people found themselves at the Sea of ​​Azov, where they came in contact with the Khazars.

As a result, many words of Turkish origin made their way into the Hungarian language. After the settlement of the Carpathian basin in 895, the Hungarians took over a lot of words from the Slavs. In addition, after adopting Christianity, many words from Latin passed into Hungarian.

The German language has had a strong influence on the Hungarian language. This influence intensified after the Habsburgs ascended to the Hungarian throne in the 16th century. At the same time, more than half of the country was occupied by the Turks, causing a new influx of Turkish words.

Linguistic reform to reduce outside influences on Hungarian

At the beginning of the 19th century, Hungarian underwent a considerable linguistic reform. Nearly 10,000 new words based on the traditional Finno-Ugric stems were added to the language, with the purpose of preserving the original and "uncontaminated" character of the language.

In addition, a special institution was established at that time, whose task was to keep the language clean by constantly creating Hungarian equivalents of international words such as “rendőrség” (police), “szálloda” (hotel), “számítógép” (computer), or “étterem” (restaurant).

This is one of the reasons for the incomprehensibility of the Hungarian language to speakers of languages from different language families.

The Origins of the Polish Language

The Polish language derives from the Proto-Indo-European language, spoken by the people inhabiting the steppes of the lower Volga around 3000 years BC.

As a result of internal fragmentation and expansion to the West, separate linguistic families began to form. At the beginning of our era, the Polish language originated from the Western variant of the Proto-Slavic language and the Lechite dialect.

Of course, the Polish language was not uniform in the beginning. Christianization and the creation of statehood played a significant role in the integration of the languages ​​of the tribes of Polans, Vistulans, and Mazovians.

Moreover, organized state and religion required precise communication, particularly the development of previously nonexistent writing.

Since its birth, the Polish language has constantly been evolving. Historians distinguish four periods in the development of the Polish language:

• Old Polish - between its formation and the beginning of the 16th century,
• Middle Polish - from the 16th century to the second half of the 18th century,
• Nowopolski (New Polish) - until 1939,
• Contemporary Polish - after 1939

In relation to modern languages ​​from the Slavic family, Polish is closest to Czech and farthest from Bulgarian.

Similarities Between Polish and Hungarian

Both Polish and Hungarian languages are spoken in Central Europe, and both use the Latin alphabet. Since Hungarian has been influenced by many languages in the past, the main similarity between these two languages are loanwords. However, there are also some similarities in their grammar and structure.

Vocabulary

After the settlement of the Carpathian basin in 895, the Hungarians adopted a lot of words from the Slavs. Because of that, there are words in Hungarian that are similar to Polish words, such as:

Overall, there are around 650 cognates shared between Polish and Hungarian. In addition, Hungarian provides some loanwords to some of the mountain dialects from the South of Poland, with words such as baca (fleece worker), gazda (shepherd), and hejnał (bugle).

There are also some cognate words between Polish and Hungarian that are recognizable in numerous languages. These are mainly loanwords from different languages that Hungarian and Polish both adopted as their own:

Grammar and Structure

Although overall, the grammar and structure of Polish and Hungarian are very different, they have some aspects in common. For example, both are to a point word-order flexible, although there are more rules in place for this in Polish than in Hungarian.

What’s more, both Polish and Hungarian have declension cases - however, Polish only has seven while Hungarian has eighteen (or more, depending on how you define cases)!

Differences Between Polish and Hungarian

Hungarian is a unique language that doesn’t share many similarities even with languages from its own language group. So let’s take a closer look at what makes it so different from Polish.

Phonology

Although Polish and Hungarian both use the Latin alphabet, they use letters that do not exist in English. Hungarian phonology is highly influenced by the phonology of the Uralic languages.

As a result, Hungarian has many vowel phonemes, generally more consonants than found in languages similar to Hungarian and fewer consonant clusters than English, Dutch, or German. Here are a few phonetic differences between Polish and Hungarian:

• There are 14 vowel phonemes in Hungarian (7 pairs of corresponding short and long vowels), compared with only 6 vowel sounds in Polish.
• In Hungarian, there are no diphthongs, which means that each vowel is pronounced separately. In Polish, diphthongs are essentially gliding vowels. Polish has no phonemic vowel length, but each vowel may occur in long or short variants.
• Hungarian has double- and triple-glyph letters (letters that consist of two or three separate parts considered to be one letter), such as cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, and zs. Polish also has some double-glyph letters, but fewer (sz, cz, rz, dz, dź, dż, ch). For example, "c" in Polish is written as "ć," whereas in Hungarian, it is written as "cs".

Grammar

There are many differences in the grammar and structure of the Hungarian and Polish languages. Let’s analyze them:

• Unlike Polish, there is no verb "mieć" (to have) in Hungarian. Instead, Hungarian uses the verbs “van” or “vannak” to express possession, which translate more into “there is” or “there are.” For example, the phrase “Mam samochód” (I have a car) in Polish is “Nekem van kocsim” (There is my car) in Hungarian.
• Hungarian has about 18 declension cases, while Polish has only 7. Hungarian nouns inflect for cases, but Hungarian declension is actually an agglutination, which consists of adding suffixes to words. These suffixes are essentially equivalent to English prepositions. In Polish, declension cases consist in changing the endings of nouns and adjectives. Therefore, the case system has an entirely different structure in these two languages.
• Unlike Polish, Hungarian is a highly agglutinative language. This means that affixes are attached to words changing their grammatical structure and meaning. This makes the structure of its words very complex and lengthy. For example, a simple word like “lehet” (it is possible) can turn into “ellehetetlenítettük” (we made it impossible).

Are Polish and Hungarian Mutually Intelligible?

In short: no. Polish and Hungarian are not mutually intelligible at all. Hungarian is incomprehensible to Poles who have never studied this language, and vice versa. This is the result of various differences in the linguistic structure, mainly when it comes to grammar and pronunciation.

Although there are a few similar words between these languages, the overwhelming majority of Hungarian words are not associated with any other European language.

Furthermore, Hungarian also has many sounds that do not exist in Polish and visa-versa, even though Polish pronunciation is more complicated. Thus, the chances of a Pole and a Hungarian understanding each other without speaking each other’s languages are close to none.

Which One Is Easier to Learn for English Speakers: Polish or Hungarian?

Native English speakers with no previous knowledge of any of the Central European languages may find both Polish and Hungarian very difficult to learn.

According to the Foreign Service Institute Language Ranking, Polish is classified in the IV category of “languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.” According to this category, learning Polish takes about 44 weeks or 1100 hours of practice.

Hungarian, however, is classified as an even more difficult language to learn in a special category with an asterisk - category IV* - which means that it is “more difficult than other languages in the same category.” In fact, Hungarian may be one of the most challenging languages to learn for English speakers.

However, if you already speak some of the Uralic languages, learning Hungarian won’t be so challenging for you. The same goes for Polish - if you’re already a Czech, Slovak, or Russian speaker, learning Polish will be very easy.

Although Polish and Hungarian may seem similar to someone who doesn’t speak either, they are entirely different, with only a few minor similarities, mainly due to the influences from other languages.

Polish and Hungarian are recognized as some of the most difficult European languages to learn, based on their grammar, structure, and pronunciation. Moreover, according to the FSI (Foreign Service Institute), Hungarian is even more difficult to learn than Polish.

However, it is worth noting that our individual predispositions also affect whether a given language turns out to be easy or difficult. What’s more, problems with mastering a given language can be solved in almost every case - by persistence, patience, and, above all, with the appropriate selection of a learning method.

By Karolina Assi

Karolina Assi is an English and Polish teacher on iTalki.com. She is a polyglot and a digital nomad. So far, she has traveled to 28 countries and lived in 4. Right now, she teaches, writes, and creates content from the Dominican Republic.

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