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Vowel Harmony: The Most Important Sound Rule

Hungarian is an agglutinative language: it builds new words and grammatical forms by “gluing” suffixes to a word stem. The form of many suffixes depends on vowel harmony.

Hungarian vowels are grouped by where they are pronounced in the mouth:

Vowel group	Short vowels	Long vowels
Front vowels	e, i, ö, ü	é, í, ő, ű
Back vowels	a, o, u	á, ó, ú

Main rule: in simple, non-compound Hungarian words, vowels usually come from one group. For example, fekete (black) has front vowels, while ablak (window) has back vowels. If a word has back vowels, it usually takes the back-vowel version of a suffix; if it has front vowels, it takes the front-vowel version.

Most suffixes have several versions. For example, the suffix meaning “in” has two forms: -ban / -ben.

• ház (house, back vowels) + -ban = házban (in the house)
• kert (garden, front vowels) + -ben = kertben (in the garden)

Exceptions and details:

• The vowels e, é, i, í can be “neutral.” They sometimes appear in otherwise back-vowel words, such as diák (student) and példa (example).
• In compound words, harmony is usually decided by the last component. For example: fő (main) + város (city) = főváros (capital city), which takes back-vowel suffixes because of város.