Hungarian Names
This essay is the same on the pages of all 4 countries that use the tradition, and what differs between them, their registers and their rankings, is on those pages.
Hungarian is a Uralic (Uralian) agglutinative language. Hungarians settled in Central Europe at the end of the ninth century and joined Western Christianity a century later, so old Hungarian names were largely replaced by Christian given names during the Middle Ages. The stock of given names was later enriched in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries by revived and newly coined Hungarian names and newer loan names. Hungarian has no grammatical gender and no corresponding gendered name endings. In countries with Hungarian minorities, the use of Hungarian names is influenced by the official language; minority onomastic corpora within Hungary are kept in a separate book of given names.
Nagy Pál
- Nagy
- Family — Nagy
- Pál
- Given — Pál
A worked example from the naming-practices survey; hover or tap a part to see its role.
Structure & order
The family name comes first, followed by the given name; an ordering that is unique in Europe. This is attributed to Hungarian syntax (the attribute + noun structure), which, unlike in other Uralian languages such as Finnish or Estonian, was not overwritten by foreign cultural and linguistic influence.
[FAMILY] [GIVEN]
A person may hold at most two given names, suited to his/her sex.
Given names
- Sources: the most common elements of the current stock are traditional names of ecclesiastical origin, though other names are also quite popular.
- A person can hold at most two given names, suited to their sex.
- At present approximately 3,500 given names can be registered in Hungary; following linguistic assessment their number is on the increase.
- Female names nowadays constitute a larger proportion of the stock.
- Hypocoristics (pet/short forms) are commonly used, and some have acquired official status as given names.
Most common given names (from Table 13.2):
| Rank | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | László | Mária |
| 2 | István | Erzsébet |
| 3 | József | Ilona |
| 4 | János | Katalin |
| 5 | Zoltán | Éva |
| 6 | Sándor | Anna |
| 7 | Ferenc | Margit |
| 8 | Gábor | Zsuzsanna |
| 9 | Attila | Julianna |
| 10 | Péter | Judit |
Family names & patronymics
- Following thirteenth-century bynames, hereditary family names became common in the fourteenth–sixteenth centuries, with official registration at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
- The most characteristic family names originate from place-names and bear the ending -i (an attributive affix; in archaic spelling -y).
- Through the Hungarianization of foreign-origin family names during the nineteenth–twentieth centuries, the stock was enriched by numerous neologisms.
- Reflecting former nationalities, there are many family names of foreign origin (especially Slavic and German), and Hungarian names of ethnonymic origin are also frequent.
Most common family names (from Table 13.2): Nagy, Kovács, Tóth, Szabó, Horváth, Varga, Kiss, Molnár, Németh, Farkas.
How to address someone
The sources do not describe salutation or honorific conventions. (Note that all married-name examples above are written in the Hungarian family-name + given-name order.)
Pitfalls for software
- Eastern ordering: family name precedes given name, the reverse of most European systems and a frequent source of mis-parsing for outsiders and software.
- No grammatical gender: there are no gendered family-name endings, unlike many neighbouring languages.
- Married-name complexity: the -né suffix and the seven possible married-name forms can make a single woman's legal name hard to decompose; the -né attaches to the husband's name, not the woman's own.
- Place-name family names carry the attributive -i / archaic -y ending.
- Foreign-origin and Hungarianized names: many family names are of Slavic or German origin or are nineteenth–twentieth-century Hungarianized neologisms.
- In Hungarian minority communities abroad, name usage is shaped by the official language of the country.
All worked examples
| Full name | Family | Given | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nagy Pál | Nagy | Pál | Standard [FAMILY] [GIVEN] order |
| Kiss Anna | Kiss | Anna | Maiden name retained after marriage |
| Nagyné Kiss Anna | Nagy- (husband) + -né, Kiss (own) | Anna | Married form: husband's family name + -né + own full name |
| Szabó László | Szabó | László | Common family name + common male given name |
Married names — the *-né* forms
The range of married names is uniquely broad, owing to traditional names ending in the affix -né (from the word nő 'woman') alongside newly introduced forms. A woman named Kiss Anna who marries Nagy Pál may choose from seven types of married name:
| Married-name form | Construction |
|---|---|
| Nagy Pálné | traditional: husband's full name + -né |
| Nagy Pálné Kiss Anna | husband's name + -né + own full name |
| Nagyné Kiss Anna | husband's family name + -né + own full name |
| Nagy Anna | husband's family name + own given name |
| Kiss Anna | own (maiden) full name retained |
| Nagy-Kiss Anna | hyphenated double family name (recent form) |
| Kiss-Nagy Anna | hyphenated double family name (recent form) |
The husband, in turn, may opt for: Nagy Pál, Kiss Pál, Nagy-Kiss Pál, or Kiss-Nagy Pál.
Where these names are used
The commonest given names and surnames of each, from its official register where one exists.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Hungarian Names”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/tradition/hungarian.