Hungarian

As a language lover, what's your favourite European language that's spoken by millions of people but studied by very few people?

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Sven Williams, L1: English, L2: German, L3: Spanish

Written 16m ago

Hungarian, by and far. It's unrelated to the Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages spoken around it, and only distantly related to Finnish and several languages spoken in Northwest Asia and Siberia, and so its structure and basic vocabulary differ greatly from the “standard average European” language. It lacks noun gender, but has some really interesting features like agglutinative morphology, separate conjugations for definite and indefinite objects, and vowel harmony.

Oh, and vowel length is independent of word stress. That sounds really cool when spoken. Written, it looks like a mess, but hearing Hungarian is a rare treat for my ears.

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