Welcome, or in Hungarian, Isten hozott!

I’m a linguistics geek who started this blog to share what I find fascinating about all things language. Come join the adventure!

Like all great love affairs, my passion for linguistics has an origin story. And it’s one that took me completely by surprise.

Last summer, my school announced that the fall play would be Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. I had my eyes on one role: Countess Andrenyi. The character speaks with a Hungarian accent and I thought it would be fun to learn. So, I did what I always do: I threw myself into research in order to prepare.

One thing on my mind was that another character in the play spoke with a Russian accent. It felt important for Countess Andrenyi to sound distinct. This is when I learned that Hungarian and Russian come from different language families. Though some experts disagree in part, Hungarian is commonly thought to be one of the world’s most unique languages due to its strong agglutinative morphology and having no “close linguistic relatives or related neighbors” (Laasko 2014 – link below).

As an agglutinative language, Hungarian combines morphemes to make a longer word. Think of them as units. The word “unclear” contains two morphemes: “un” and “clear.” In Hungarian, the word for “house” is “ház” and the word for “in house” is “házban.” You can find morphemes by breaking down a word until you cannot logically break it down further. Russian, being a Slavic language, is fusional. Instead of adding morphemes like Hungarian, Russian “fuses” them to create a new word. Even after I got the part, I couldn’t stop reading about it. I was hooked.

Acting in a Hungarian accent? Bliss. Discovering linguistics in the process? 10/10. Highly recommend.

Read More

Laakso, Johanna. “Hungarian Is No Idioma Incomparabile: The Hungarian Language Reform in European Comparison.” Hungarian Cultural Studies. e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Volume 7 (2014): https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2014.165.