World Language Map

Where is Hungarian spoken?

Hungarian (magyar nyelv) is an Uralic language, spoken in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and 6 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Hungarian is spoken

Hungarian is spoken in 10 countries: Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and 6 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Hungary100%9,855,750
Romania6.6%1,197,781
Slovakia11%612,002
Serbia4.8%319,306
Ukraine0.4%131,949
Israel1%94,026
Canada0.2%69,831
Austria0.3%23,317
Slovenia0.4%9,231
CroatiaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Hungarian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Hungarian.

How many people speak Hungarian?

Wikidata gives about 12.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Hungarian sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Hungarian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Uralic
  2. Hungaric
  3. Hungarian

More about Hungarian

Codes: ISO 639-3 hun, Glottolog hung1274. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Hungarian

Where is Hungarian spoken?

Hungarian is spoken in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and 6 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 100% of the population of Hungary, which is about 9,855,750 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Hungarian?

Wikidata gives about 12.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Hungarian in?

Glottolog places Hungarian in the Uralic family, in the branch Hungaric.

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