Hunglish refers to any mixing of the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

and Hungarian languages as a result of

linguistic interference Language transfer is the application of linguistic features from one language to another by a bilingual or multilingual speaker. Language transfer may occur across both languages in the acquisition of a simultaneous bilingual, from a mature sp ...

. This most often involves ungrammatical or awkward English expressions typical of Hungarian learners of English, as well as English words and phrases imported into the Hungarian language. The term is a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsprepositional phrases An adpositional phrase, in linguistics, is a syntactic category that includes ''prepositional phrases'', ''postpositional phrases'', and ''circumpositional phrases''. Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or circ ...

''(e.g. "I remember to him," "I need to food")''. A wide variety of

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In vari ...

s are used in Hungarian to express verb objects; these cases are then mistranslated based on common English translations in other contexts. * Failure to capitalize proper nouns ''(e.g. "I have english class on monday")''. Proper nouns are less frequently capitalized in Hungarian than in English. * Omission of the word ''is'' ''(e.g. "My name Gabor")''. * Ungrammatical use of reflexive pronouns ''(e.g. "I feel myself good" rather than "I feel good"''). * Use of third-person pronouns in the wrong gender ''(e.g. "My mother bought himself a purse")''. Hungarian has only one third-person pronoun, ''ő'', used for both male and female genders. * Failure to use the

imperfect tense The imperfect (abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to w ...

, which does not exist in Hungarian ''(e.g. "I slept when she arrived" rather than "I was sleeping when she arrived").'' * Overuse of the definite article ''the'' ''(e.g. "the patience is a virtue"'' ''rather than "patience is a virtue").''

Examples in Hungarian

* The Hungarian word ''karakter'' traditionally means "personality," but is now often used as in English to mean "character" as in "the main character of the novel." * Words which are capitalized in English but traditionally not in Hungarian, such as days of the week and nationalities, are increasingly capitalized in Hungarian as well. * ''Idővonal'', a

calque In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language wh ...

of the English "timeline" is increasingly used in place of the more traditional words ''időrend'' and ''kronológia.'' * Terms that are split into two words in English are increasingly also split in Hungarian, such as ''szoftver fejlesztő'' (software developer) in place of the more traditional ''szoftverfejlesztő.'' * ''Egérpad'' is often used to mean "mouse pad," superseding the original term ''egéralátét'' (lit. "mouse underlay"). Some Hungarians object to this term because the Hungarian ''pad'' means "bench," and e''gérpad'' therefore literally translates to "mouse bench."

References

{{interlanguage varieties Macaronic forms of English Hungarian language

Examples in Hungarian

See also

References