Hungarian Vs. Finnish: Comparing The Finno-Ugric Languages
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People ask me the same question all the time: “Since Hungarian and Finnish are in the same language family, can you understand Finnish?”
It’s a great question. Both Hungarian and Finnish belong to the Finno-Ugric language family. Because they’re grouped together, many people assume they’re as similar as Spanish and Italian.
But the short answer is: no, we can’t understand each other at all.
Here’s a breakdown of Hungarian vs. Finnish, what they actually have in common, and why they sound so completely different today.
Table of Contents:
Are Hungarian and Finnish mutually intelligible?
“Mutually intelligible” means two people speaking different languages can understand each other. For example, a Spanish speaker can usually figure out what an Italian speaker is saying.
Hungarian and Finnish aren’t mutually intelligible.
If a Finn and a Hungarian sat down to talk, they wouldn’t understand a single sentence. In fact, English and Hindi are technically in the same language family (Indo-European), but an English speaker can’t understand Hindi. The relationship between Hungarian and Finnish is very similar to that!
Even if you look at regional Hungarian dialects (like the beautiful Székely dialect spoken in Transylvania), none of them sound any closer to Finnish.
Shared language features (grammar)
If the words don’t sound the same, why are they in the same family? The answer is in the “bones” of the languages. They share the same grammatical logic and structure.
Here are the biggest things Hungarian and Finnish have in common:
They’re agglutinative languages Instead of using separate small words (like “in”, “on”, or “with”), both languages glue endings onto the base word like Lego bricks.
Házamban
In this example, ház means house, am means my, and ban means in. Finnish does the exact same thing (house in Finnish is talo, and “in my house” is talossani).
They use vowel harmony In both languages, the vowels in the word dictate what kind of ending you’re allowed to glue on. The front vowels and back vowels must match perfectly, otherwise the word sounds wrong to a native speaker.
No grammatical gender Neither language uses “he” or “she”. There are no masculine or feminine words.
Ő olvas.
In Hungarian, we just use ő for both males and females. In Finnish, they use the word hän. It makes learning this part of the language very easy!
Vocabulary comparison
Even though Hungarian and Finnish aren’t mutually intelligible, linguists found proof of their connection by looking at very basic, ancient words.
Over thousands of years, the pronunciation changed. For example, a “k” sound at the beginning of a Finnish word often slowly changed into an “h” sound in Hungarian.
Here’s a table showing a few ancient Finno-Ugric words. Notice the similarities!
| English | Hungarian | Finnish |
|---|---|---|
| Water | víz | vesi |
| Hand | kéz | käsi |
| Blood | vér | veri |
| Fish | hal | kala |
| Eye | szem | silmä |
| Ice | jég | jää |
When these words are spoken in normal, everyday sentences, the connection gets completely lost, but the ancient roots are definitely still there.
A hal a vízben van.
Why are they so different today?
If Hungarian and Finnish started in the same place, why are they so completely different now? It all comes down to geography and history.
Thousands of years ago, the ancestors of Hungarians and Finns lived near the Ural Mountains in modern-day Russia. Around 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, the group split up.
- The ancestors of the Finns moved north toward Scandinavia. They mixed with Baltic and Germanic tribes, absorbing a lot of their vocabulary.
- The ancestors of the Hungarians became nomadic horse-riders. They migrated south and west for hundreds of years before eventually settling in the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe.
Along the journey, Hungarians picked up hundreds of words from Turkic, Slavic, and Germanic peoples. Because they were separated by massive distances for thousands of years, the two languages evolved in entirely different directions.
Summary
Hungarian and Finnish belong to the same language family, but they’re like very distant cousins who haven’t spoken in 4,000 years.
While they share the same grammatical logic (like gluing words together and having no “he” or “she”), their vocabularies are completely different because of their unique histories.
Want to learn more about how Hungarian works? Check out my other guides:
- How to learn Hungarian grammar
- The hardest parts of learning Hungarian
- Hungarian vowel harmony explained
