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Foreign languages in Hungary


Foreign languages in Hungary

Since English is now obligatory in schools, if you address people in their teens, twenties or lower thirties, you stand a good chance that they will speak English well enough to help you out. However, due to Hungary's history, the older generation had less access to foreign language tuition, so your chances are worse, and with people over 50 as good as zero. A minority of Hungarians speaks Russian, which was obligatory in the Communist era, although most Hungarians are quite happy to forget it so try it only as a last resort. German is also very useful in Hungary: it is almost just as widely spoken as English, and almost universally so near the Austrian border and especially Sopron, which is officially bilingual and has huge contacts with Vienna due to it being accesible by Vienna suburban trains. In these areas, and with older people in general, German will most often take you a lot further than English. Basically, in Hungary, you will have a much better chance finding someone speaking a foreign language (mostly English and German) in larger cities, especially in those with universities such as Budapest, Debrecen, Miskolc, and Szeged. In rural areas the chance may be as good as zero, in some cases even with young people, except in southwestern region of Venvidék, where there is a strong Slovenian minority speaking Slovene.

The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Hungary


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Hungary Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.

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