The Hungarian Language A Short Descriptive Grammar Beáta Megyesi Hungarian, also called Magyar, traditionally belongs to the Ob-Ugric languages (e.g. Khanty and Mansi) of the Finno-Ugric branch of Uralic. Hungarian is the official language of the Republic of Hungary, and has approximately fifteen million speakers, of which four million reside outside of Hungary. In this paper a description of Hungarian phonology, morphology and syntax follows. The sections are based on Benkö & Imre (1972), Rácz (1968), Olsson (1992) and Abondolo (1992). 1.1 Phonology Hungarian has a rich system of vowels and consonants. The vowel inventory consists of 14 phonemes of which one can distinguish 5 pairs, consisting of short and long counterparts; these are i - í, o - ó, ö - ö, u - ú, ü - ü. The remaining four are e - é and a - á. Short vowels, if they are marked, take an umlaut (¨), while long vowels are indicated by an acute (´) or with a double acute accent (´´) which is a diacritic unique to Hungarian. Long vowels are usually somewhat tenser than their short counterparts with two exceptions; e is low while é is higher mid and á is low whereas a is lower mid and slightly rounded (Abondolo, 1992). Vowel length is independent of prosodic factors such as stress. The vowels may be interconnected through the laws of vowel harmony which means that suffixes, which may assume two or three different forms, usually agree in backness with the last vowel of the stem. In other words, front vs. back alternatives of suffixes are selected according to which vowel(s) the stem contain(s) (Benkö & Imre, 1972). The vocalism of stems, classified by Abondolo (1992), is inherently back for all stems containing at least one back vowel and for most verbs with the sole vowel i or í. For all other stems the vocalism is front. In regard to vowel harmony, i and í are neutral and can be used with either front (high) or back (low) vowels. Harmony causes the following alternations among suffix combinations: a/e (-ban/-ben - 'in'), á/é (-nál/-nél - 'at'), ó/ö (-ból/-böl - 'from'), u/ü (-ul/- ül - 'for, by') and o/e/ö (-hoz/-hez/-höz - 'to'). The vowels may show even paradigmatic alternations as long and short vowels (é vs. e and á vs. a, see the example below) alternate in some stems (Benkö & Imre, 1972). Example 1 tehén tehen-et fa fá-t cow:NOM cow-ACC tree:NOM tree-ACC ’cow’ ’tree’ When building a Hungarian corpus it is usual to delete the accent and the umlaut from the vowel and mark vowel length as well as the umlaut by numerals which follow the vowel: 1 denotes the acute accent (e.g. ó -> o1), 2 the umlaut (ü -> u2) and 3 the double acute accent (e.g. ö -> o3). This notation can be useful when automatically deriving rules from a corpus because of the paradigmatic alternations of the long vs. short vowels. There are totally 25 consonants, which can be determined according to the manner and the place of articulation, voicing and quantity. The consonants are shown in the table below.