Hungary Culture & Language

Hungarian culture is defined by the language first, and by a nineteenth-century revival that consciously built a national identity out of village material.

Music collected from the fields

Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly walked the villages with phonographs from 1905, recording thousands of peasant songs, and used what they found to rebuild their own composition from the ground up. Kodaly’s method of teaching music through singing is used in schools worldwide. Franz Liszt had already done something similar with a more romantic idea of what Hungarian music was.

The dance house movement

Tanchaz began in Budapest in the 1970s as a way of learning village dances and playing the music live rather than watching a staged folk troupe. It is still running, it is genuinely participatory, and it is on the UNESCO list as a model of heritage transmission.

Paprika and the kitchen

Paprika arrived with the Ottomans and became the defining seasoning within two centuries. Gulyas is a soup rather than a stew; porkolt is the stew; halaszle is a fisherman’s soup from the Tisza that is far hotter than visitors expect. Szeged and Kalocsa grow and grind the peppers.

Baths and coffee houses

Both are Ottoman and Habsburg inheritances still in daily use, and the great coffee houses of Pest were where the literary magazines of the early twentieth century were written.

Invention

The Rubik’s cube was designed as a teaching aid by an architecture lecturer in Budapest. The biro, the holograph and a great deal of early computing theory also have Hungarian names attached.

Hungarian is not related to any of its neighbours’ languages. It belongs to the Uralic family, alongside Finnish and Estonian, and it is agglutinative — meaning grammatical information is stacked onto the end of words, producing the very long forms visitors notice on signs.

It has a reputation for difficulty that is largely earned, and nobody expects a visitor to learn it. Pronunciation is at least consistent: sz is s, s is sh, gy is roughly the d in during, and stress is always on the first syllable.

English is widely spoken in Budapest, in tourism and among younger people; German is common in the west and around Balaton. In small towns and among older people, neither may be available.

A few words go a long way: szia for hello and goodbye informally, jo napot for good day, koszonom for thank you, egeszsegedre for cheers — which nobody expects a foreigner to manage.