The phonology of Hungarian is notable for its process of vowel harmony, the frequent occurrence of geminate consonants and the presence of otherwise uncommon palatal stops.
Consonants This is the standard Hungarian consonantal system, using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;" |+ Consonant phonemes of Hungarian ! ! colspan="2" | Labial ! colspan="2" | DentalLaminal dental, apart from the sibilants, which are laminal denti-alveolar. ! colspan="2" | Post-alveolar ! colspan="2" | Palatal ! colspan="2" | Velar ! colspan="2" | Glottal |- ! Nasal | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | colspan="2" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | colspan="2" | |- ! Plosive | style="border-right:0;" width="25px" | || style="border-left:0;" width="25px" | | style="border-right:0;" width="25px" | || style="border-left:0;" width="25px" | | colspan="2" | | rowspan="2" style="border-right:0;border-top:0;" | || rowspan="2" style="border-left:0;border-top:0;" | | style="border-right:0;" width="25px" | || style="border-left:0;" width="25px" | | colspan="2" | |- ! Affricate | colspan="2" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | style="border-right:0;" width="25px" | || style="border-left:0;" width="25px" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | |- ! Fricative | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | style="border-right:0;" width="25px" | || style="border-left:0;" width="25px" | |- ! Trill | colspan="2" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | |- ! Approximant | colspan="2" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | colspan="2" | | style="border-right:0;" | || style="border-left:0;" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" |
It is debated whether the palatal consonant pair consists of stops or affricates. They are considered affricates or stops, depending on register, by Tamás Szende, head of the department of General Linguistics at PPKE, and stops by Mária Gósy, research professor, head of the Department of Phonetics at ELTE. The reason for the different analyses is that the relative duration of the friction of (as compared to the duration of its closure) is longer than those of the stops, but shorter than those of the affricates. has the stop-like nature of having a full duration no longer than those of other (voiceless) stops such as but, considering the average closure time in relation to the friction time of the consonants, its duration structure is somewhat closer to those of the affricates.
Almost every consonant may be geminated, represented in writing by doubling a single letter grapheme: for , for , for etc., or by doubling the first letter of a digraph: for , for , etc.
The phonemes and can occur in spoken language as geminates: bridzs ('bridge'). (For the list of examples and exceptions, see Hungarian dz and dzs.)
In the western dialects, lost its palatal feature and merged with (alveolar lateral approximant). In the northern dialects, the phoneme has been preserved.BENKŐ Loránd; IMRE Samu (ed.): The Hungarian Language. Janua Linguarum, Series Practica, No. 134. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter (1972).
Hungarian orthography, unlike that of the surrounding Slavic languages, does not use háčky or any other consonant diacritics. Instead, the letters c, s, z are used alone (, , ) or combined in the digraphs cs, sz, zs (, , ), while y is used only in the digraphs ty, gy, ly, ny as a palatalization marker to write the sounds , , (formerly ), .
The most distinctive allophones are: becomes if between a voiceless obstruent and a word boundary (e.g. lopj 'steal'). becomes e.g. between voiced obstruents, such as dobj be 'throw (one/some) in' may become between two vowels (e.g. tehát 'so'), after front vowels (e.g. ihlet 'inspiration'), and word-finally after back vowels (e.g. doh 'musty') if it is not deleted (which it often is; e.g. méh 'bee', but even then, some dialects still pronounce it, e.g., ).Balázs Sinkovics, Gyula Zsigri: A H-ra vonatkozó megszorítások történeti változásai in A nyelvtörténeti kutatások újabb eredményei vol. 4, JATE Press, 2005 According to Gósy, it becomes (rather than ) in words such as pech, ihlet, technika ('bad luck, inspiration, technology/technique'), while it becomes postvelar fricative in words such as doh, sah, jacht, Allah, eunuch, potroh. becomes when geminated, in certain words: dohhal ('with blight'), peches ('unlucky').
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" |+ Examples |- ! Phoneme ! colspan="2" | Example ! Translation
| pipa | | 'pipe'
| bot | | 'stick'
| toll | | 'feather', 'pen'
| dob | | 'throw', 'drum'
| kép | | 'picture'
| gép | | 'machine'
| fa | | 'tree'
| vág | | 'cut'
| szó | | 'word'
| zöld | | 'green'
| só | | 'salt'
| zseb | | 'pocket'
| jó | | 'good'
| hó | | 'snow'
| cél | | 'goal', 'target'
| edző | | 'coach'
| csak | | 'only'
| dzsessz | | 'jazz'
| ló | | 'horse'
| tyúk | | 'hen'
| gyár | | 'factory'
| ró | | 'carve'
| ma | | 'today'
| nem | | 'no', 'gender'
| nyár | | 'summer'
Vowels
Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. Their phonetic values do not exactly match up with each other, so represents and represents ; likewise, represents while represents .Short a is slightly rounded in the standard language, though some dialects exhibit an unrounded version closer to (). For the other pairs, the short vowels are slightly lower and more central, and the long vowels more peripheral: are phonetically near-close . has been variously described as close-mid and mid . and the marginal are phonetically near-open , but they may be somewhat less open in other dialects. is phonetically mid . and the marginal are phonetically open central .
The sound marked by is considered to be by Tamás Szende and by Mária Gósy. Gósy also mentions a different short that contrasts with both and , present in a few words like Svájc ('Switzerland'), svá ('schwa'), advent ('advent'), hardver ('hardware', this usage is considered hyperforeign or simply dated), and halló (used when answering the phone; contrasting with haló 'dying', and háló 'web').
There are two more marginal sounds, namely the long as well as the long . They are used in the name of the letters E and A, which are pronounced and , respectively. The adjective fair (as 'equitable') is pronounced in Hungarian with (it may also be short, though). This sound occurs as an alternative in erre 'this way' (instead of doubling the /r/), just like in arra 'that way'.
e-ë distinction The letter e marks two different historical vowels, colloquially called "open e" (nyílt e) and "closed e" (zárt e). The orthography and standard pronunciation do not differentiate between the two, but many dialects do, with various pronunciations for the two vowels such as or for "open e" and or for "closed e". In text that wishes to highlight which of the two vowels is used in which place, the letter e is used for "open e" only, while "closed e" is marked with ë. There are minimal pairs that are distinguished only by the two e vowels. For example, mentek could represent four different words: mëntëk ('you all go'), mëntek ('they went'), mentëk ('I save'), and mentek ('they are exempt'). In Standard Hungarian, the first three collapse to , while the latter one is unknown, having a different form in the literary language (mentesek).
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" |+ e-ë distinction by region ! Region ! e ! ë ! Example: ember ("person, human") |- | Northeastern,Mezőség,Budapest(standard language)
| /ɛmbɛr/ |- | Western(e.g. Veszprém, Zala, Vas)
| /æmbɛr/ |- | Along the Danube,Tiszántúl
| /ɛmber/ |- | Southern(ë replaced with ö)
| /ɛmbør/
Vowel examples
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" |+ Examples ! Phoneme ! colspan="3" | Example
| hat | | 'six' |- | () | a | | 'the letter A' |- | () | Svájc | | 'Switzerland'
| lát | | 'see'
| ok | | 'cause'
| tó | | 'lake'
| fut | | 'run'
| kút | | 'well'
| lesz | | 'will be' |- | () | e | | 'the letter E'
| rész | | 'part'
| visz | | 'carry'
| víz | | 'water'
| sör | | 'beer'
| bőr | | 'skin'
| üt | | 'hit'
| tűz | | 'fire'
Vowel harmony
As in Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian, vowel harmony plays an important part in determining the distribution of vowels in a word. Hungarian vowel harmony distinguishes vowels according to front vs. back assonance and rounded vs unrounded for the front vowels. Excluding recent loanwords, words in Hungarian only contain either back vowels or front vowels as a result of vowel harmony.
{| class="wikitable" style=text-align:center |+ Hungarian vowel harmony
! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2" | Front ! colspan="2" rowspan="2" | Back
! unrounded ! rounded
! Close
! Mid
! Open
While , , , and are all front unrounded vowels, they are considered to be "neutral vowels" in Hungarian vowel harmony. Therefore, if a word contains back vowels, neutral vowels may appear alongside them. However, if only neutral vowels appear in a stem, the stem is treated as though it is of front vowel assonance and all suffixes must contain front vowels.
Vowel harmony in Hungarian is most notable when observing suffixation. Vowel harmony must be maintained throughout the entire word, meaning that most suffixes have variants. For example, the dative case marker vs. . Stems that contain back vowels affix back vowel suffixes, and stems that contain only front vowels affix front vowel suffixes. However, the front vowel stems distinguish rounded vs. unroundedness based on the last vowel in the stem. If the last vowel is front and rounded, it takes a suffix with a front rounded vowel; otherwise it follows the standard rules. While suffixes for most words have front/back vowel variants, there are not many that have rounded/unrounded variants, indicating that this is a rarer occurrence.
One is able to observe the distinction when looking at the plural affix, either (back), (front unrounded), or (front rounded).
{|class=wikitable style=text-align:center |+ Hungarian vowel harmony and suffixation ! Stem ! Plural ! Stem gloss ! Vowels in stem !Vowel in suffix |- | /ˈɒstɒl/ asztal | /ˈɒstɒlok/ asztal-ok | “table” | Only back vowels | rowspan="2" |/o/ |- | /ˈpɒpiːr/ papír | /ˈpɒpiːrok/ papír-ok | “paper” | Back vowel with neutral vowel |- | /ˈfyzet/ füzet | /ˈfyzetek/ füzet-ek | “notebook” | Only front vowels, last vowel unrounded. | rowspan="2" |/e/ |- | /ˈɟerek/ gyerek | /ˈɟerekek/ gyerek-ek | “child” | Only neutral (front) vowels, last vowel unrounded. |- | /ˈiʃmerøːʃ/ ismerős | /ˈiʃmerøːʃøk/ ismerős-ök | “acquaintance” | Only front vowels, last vowel rounded. |/ø/
As can be seen above, the neutral vowels occur in both front and back vowel assonance words. However, there are about fifty monosyllabic roots that only contain , , or that take a back vowel suffix instead of the front vowel suffix.
{|class=wikitable style=text-align:center |+ Irregular suffixation ! Stem ! Gloss ! "At" ! "From" |- | híd | bridge | híd-nál | híd-tól |- | cél | aim | cél-nál | cél-tól