The Hungarian Alphabet: 40 Letters, or 44

How many letters are in the Hungarian alphabet?

The Hungarian alphabet has 40 letters. Count in q, w, x and y, which survive only in loanwords and in old family names, and you get the 44-letter extended alphabet. Both numbers are right, and the difference between them is exactly those four letters: the Academy's orthography lists the 40 in rule 10 and then, in rule 11, shows where q, w, x and y are slotted into the sequence.

Of the 40, thirty-one are written with a single character, eight are digraphs (cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs) and one, dzs, is a trigraph. Counted by sound that is 14 vowels and 26 consonants. A digraph here is one letter, not a cluster of two, and Hungarians treat it that way: in a dictionary every c word comes before the first cs word, and the surname Szabó is filed after Sándor, because s and sz sit in separate blocks.

The alphabet in its official order. An asterisk marks the four letters that belong only to the 44-letter set:

Letter	IPA	Sounds like	Example
a	[ɒ]	short 'a' with rounded lips, like British hot	alma (apple)
á	[aː]	long open 'a', like father	Árpád (Prince Árpád)
b	[b]	as in bed	Buda (Buda)
c	[ts]	'ts' in cats, never 'k'	cukor (sugar)
cs	[tʃ]	'ch' in church	csárda (roadside inn)
d	[d]	as in door, never softened	Duna (the Danube)
dz	[dz]	'ds' in kids	bodza (elderberry)
dzs	[dʒ]	'j' in jam	dzsem (jam)
e	[ɛ]	open 'e' in bed	eper (strawberry)
é	[eː]	long close 'e', no glide at the end	édes (sweet)
f	[f]	as in fish	fürdő (thermal bath)
g	[ɡ]	hard 'g' in go	gulyás (goulash)
gy	[ɟ]	soft 'd', close to British due	magyar (Hungarian)
h	[h]	as in house	Hortobágy (the Hortobágy puszta)
i	[i]	short 'ee'	igen (yes)
í	[iː]	long 'ee'	ír (writes)
j	[j]	'y' in yes	jó (good)
k	[k]	as in sky, no puff of air	kürtőskalács (chimney cake)
l	[l]	clear 'l', never dark	lángos (fried flatbread)
ly	[j]	identical to j	gulyás (goulash)
m	[m]	as in map	Mátyás (King Matthias)
n	[n]	as in net	nap (sun, day)
ny	[ɲ]	'ny' in canyon	nyár (summer)
o	[o]	short close 'o'	ország (country)
ó	[oː]	long 'o'	óra (hour, clock)
ö	[ø]	German ö	öt (five)
ő	[øː]	long ö	őz (roe deer)
p	[p]	as in spin, no puff of air	paprika (paprika)
q *	[kv]	loanwords and place names only	Aquincum (Roman Óbuda)
r	[r]	tapped or rolled	Rubik (Ernő Rubik)
s	[ʃ]	'sh' in ship	sör (beer)
sz	[s]	's' in sun	Szeged (Szeged)
t	[t]	as in stop, no puff of air	tokaji (Tokaj wine)
ty	[c]	soft 't', close to British tune	tyúk (hen)
u	[u]	short 'oo'	utca (street)
ú	[uː]	long 'oo'	út (road)
ü	[y]	German ü	ünnep (holiday)
ű	[yː]	long ü	űr (outer space)
v	[v]	as in van	víz (water)
w *	[v]	old family names only	Wesselényi (a noble family)
x *	[ks]	loanwords only	taxi (taxi)
y *	[i]	on its own only in old surnames, and as the second half of gy, ly, ny, ty	Ady (the poet Endre Ady)
z	[z]	as in zoo	zene (music)
zs	[ʒ]	's' in measure	Zsolnay (the Pécs porcelain works)

The accents mark length, not stress

The mark on á, é, í, ó, ő, ú and ű has nothing to do with emphasis. It marks a separate letter with a separate sound: the vowel is held roughly twice as long, and that length alone can change the word.

Short	Long
agy (brain)	ágy (bed)
kor (era, age)	kór (disease)
örül (is glad)	őrül (goes mad)
tör (breaks)	tőr (dagger)

Note that a and á differ in quality as well as length: a is a short rounded [ɒ], á a long unrounded [aː]. The pairs ö/ő and ü/ű are the German ö and ü in short and long versions.

Stress is always on the first syllable

Every Hungarian word is stressed on syllable one, wherever the long vowels fall: BA-la-ton, PÁ-lin-ka, GU-lyás, KÜR-tős-ka-lács. Tanár (teacher) is the classic trap: the stress stays on the short first syllable even though the long á is in the second.

The consonants that catch everyone out

s = [ʃ] and sz = [s], the reverse of what most alphabets suggest. You already say it correctly in Budapest (Buda-pesht) and Puskás (Push-kaash); Szeged is Seged.
c is always [ts], never [k]: cukor, Debrecen.
ly is simply j: gulyás is goo-yaash, not gool-yash. The two spellings are a historical leftover; the sound merged centuries ago.
gy, ny, ty are single soft consonants, not a consonant plus y: magyar, nyár, tyúk.
p, t and k carry no puff of air, so tokaji sounds closer to Italian than to English.

When two letters are not a digraph

Letters that look like a digraph can also meet across a morpheme boundary. In egészség (health) the z and the s belong to different parts of the word (egész plus ség), so this is not the letter zs. The toast Egészségedre! is the easiest way to remember it, ideally over a glass of pálinka.

A long digraph doubles only its first character: asszony (woman), meggy (sour cherry), annyi (that much). The full digraph is written twice only where two words meet, as in jegygyűrű (wedding ring).

Frequently asked questions

When is The Hungarian Alphabet: 40 Letters, or 44 used?

The Hungarian alphabet has 40 letters . Count in q , w , x and y , which survive only in loanwords and in old family names, and you get the 44-letter extended alphabet . Both numbers are right, and the difference between them is exactly those four letters: the Academy's orthography lists the 40 in rule 10 and then, in rule 11, shows where q, w, x and y are slotted into the sequence.

How is The Hungarian Alphabet: 40 Letters, or 44 formed?

Of the 40, thirty-one are written with a single character, eight are digraphs (cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs) and one, dzs , is a trigraph. Counted by sound that is 14 vowels and 26 consonants. A digraph here is one letter, not a cluster of two, and Hungarians treat it that way: in a dictionary every c word comes before the first cs word, and the surname Szabó is filed after Sándor , because s and sz sit in separate blocks. The alphabet in its official order. An asterisk marks the four letters that belong only to the 44-letter set: The mark on á, é, í, ó, ő, ú and ű has nothing to do with emphasis.

What are common mistakes with The Hungarian Alphabet: 40 Letters, or 44?

Counting the letters wrong because the digraphs get split: cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs and the trigraph dzs are single letters, which is why the total is 40 rather than 26 plus accents. Reading s as [s] and sz as [ʃ], the wrong way round. Treating the accents as stress marks and shortening the vowel, which turns ágy (bed) into agy (brain). Moving the stress off the first syllable in words like tanár . Reading ly as an English 'ly' cluster in gulyás .

Sources

A magyar helyesírás szabályai, 12. kiadás (AkH.12), 10. és 11. pont — Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Nyelvtudományi Intézet (Akadémiai Kiadó), 2015

Rule 10 lists the 40 letters of the Hungarian alphabet, including the eight digraphs and the trigraph dzs; rule 11 gives the position of q, w, x and y, which produce the 44-letter extended alphabet.

The Phonology of Hungarian (The Phonology of the World's Languages) — Oxford University Press, 2000

Péter Siptár and Miklós Törkenczy on the segmental system: the seven short and long vowel pairs as separate phonemes, the s [ʃ] versus sz [s] contrast, and fixed word-initial stress.

Hungarian (Descriptive Grammars series), István Kenesei, Robert M. Vago, Anna Fenyvesi — Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 1998

Reference grammar used for the letter-to-sound correspondences and for the treatment of the digraphs and the trigraph as single graphemes. Open record in the University of Szeged repository.

Венгерский язык. Часть I: Введение, фонетика, морфология (К. Е. Майтинская) — Издательство Академии наук СССР, Москва, 1955

The standard Russian-language academic description of Hungarian phonetics; the basis for the contrasts drawn here with Russian vowel reduction, palatalization before front vowels and word-final devoicing. Print source, no stable public URL.