Track 30

Track 30

My mother tongue is Hungarian. It is spoken in Hungary and it is a minority language in the surrounding countries, especially Romania. It is not part of the same language family as European languages like English, French, German or Russian. It is a Uralic language, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian.

Because Hungarian is not a widely spoken language, if you want to get on, you have to speak a foreign language. Unsurprisingly, the most popular second language among Hungarians is English, the global language. Like most of my friends, I am multilingual- as well as Hungarian, I am fluent in English and German.

I can also get by in Italian and I did an evening course in Spanish a few years back, but I’m a bit rusty now. I seem to pick up languages quite easily, helped, I’m sure, by the fact that language teaching in Hungary is so good - it has to be, given that no-one speaks our language but us!