Hungarian grammar

Hungarian grammar is the grammar of the Hungarian language, which is a Uralic language mainly spoken in Hungary and in parts of its seven neighboring countries.

Hungarian is an agglutinative language. It uses various affixes, mainly suffixes, to change a word's meaning and grammatical function. The suffixes are attached according to vowel harmony. The verbs are conjugated according to definiteness, tense, mood, person and number. The nouns can be declined with 18 case suffixes, most of which correspond to English prepositions. Hungarian is a topic-prominent language, which means that word order depends on the topic-comment structure of the sentence (e.g. what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized).

Neutral Hungarian sentences have a subject–verb–object word order, like English. Hungarian is a null subject language, meaning the subject does not have to be explicitly stated. Word order is determined not by syntactic roles, but rather by pragmatic factors. Emphasis is placed on the word or phrase immediately preceding the finite verb.

A sentence usually consists of four parts: topic, focus, verb and the rest. Any of the four parts may be empty. The topic and the rest may contain any number of phrases but the focus may contain at most one phrase.

The tables below contain some Hungarian variations of the English sentence "John took Peter two books yesterday." Besides the verb, the sentence contains four other elements: "John", "Peter", "two books", "yesterday".

The topic contains a phrase or phrases which the speaker supposes as known and which is used for introducing a topic that the statement will be about (cf. "as far as X is concerned, ..."). The focus attracts the attention to an element of the event which is either supposed as unknown or it may be a refutation to a possible opposing belief. It excludes the validity of the statement for all other individuals in question ("it was X and nothing else that...").

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