Hungarian Orthography - Basics

Basics

The Hungarian language is written with letters that denote sounds. It is written with the Hungarian alphabet, which is based on the Latin alphabet. Its letters usually indicate sounds, except when morphemes are to be marked (see below). An important principle of Hungarian orthography is that it tries to reflect the meaning, so different meanings are to be expressed with different written forms.

Consonant sounds unfamiliar in the Latin alphabet are marked with a digraph or a trigraph (such as cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs) and unfamiliar vowel sounds are marked by adding diacritics on the vowel letters (such as á, é, í, ó, ú; ö, ü; ő, ű). Long consonants are marked by a double letter (e.g. l > ll and sz > ssz) while long vowels get an acute accent (e.g. o > ó) or their umlaut is replaced with a double acute accent (only ö, ü > ő, ű). In case of capitalization, only the first letter of digraphs and of the trigraph dzs is written in upper case – with the exception of acronyms and all-uppercase inscriptions.

The letters q, x, y, w are only part of the extended Hungarian alphabet and they are rarely used in Hungarian words – they are normally replaced with their usual phonetic equivalents kv, ksz, i, v (only the x is relatively common, e.g. taxi). Ch is not a part of the alphabet but it still exists in some words (like technika, 'technology' or 'technique'). In traditional surnames, other digraphs may occur as well, both for vowels and consonants.