Hungary is not known for welcoming immigrants. But in a country where the language is difficult to master, many immigrants might simply choose to move on.
A man asks a woman for help in Ukrainian and she tells him to please speak Hungarian.
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I’m at the Posta (Post Office) in Budapest, sending a birthday card to a friend in the UK. On the front of the envelope, I’ve written her address in Nagy Britannia (Great Britain) and on the back, my own in Magyarország (Hungary).
In the correct Hungarian way, I’ve put my surname before my given name: Womack Helen. Now this should be simple; I just need a stamp.
The nő (woman) behind the counter says something completely unintelligible to me. “Születésnapi kártya (birthday card),” I say, guessing she’s asking me what’s inside. But that doesn’t seem to satisfy her. I shrug. She smiles kindly and writes something herself. “Ezt írd alá (sign this),” she says, so I do. I have no idea what I’ve signed. “Szép napot (have a nice day),” we say to each other.
This modest exchange I manage after seven years of trying to learn Hungarian, with three different Hungarian teachers and hours of Duolingo. OK, I’m 68 and yes, a bit lazy, but you’d have thought I would have made more progress by now. I am functionally illiterate in the world’s sixth most difficult language.
My experience as a relatively privileged expat helps me to understand the struggle refugees and migrants face in Hungary. And also why, although the Hungarians are not unfriendly people, Hungary does not greatly encourage large numbers of asylum seekers and migrants. Language is crucial to successful integration but the language barrier here can seem insurmountable.
Hungary and refugees from Ukraine
Hungary, with its reputation for being uncooperative in the European Union and leaning too far towards Moscow, has been in the news recently for “unkindness” to Ukrainian refugees. It has just brought in a new law that only refugees coming from areas where fighting is actually going on can count on Hungarian state support.
This leaves several thousand refugees, many of them Roma people from relatively safe western Ukraine, facing either homelessness or the prospect of having to go back to Ukraine.
The U.S. ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, recently visited some of these people at a temporary shelter in the city of Esztergom.
“The reality for the Ukrainian people,” he said, “is that their entire country continues to suffer the inhumanity of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The vulnerable women and children whom I spoke with today deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. It is unconscionable that they do not know where they will be sleeping at the end of the week.”
So this is clearly a human rights issue. But let’s look at the figures.
This map shows Hungary’s proximity to Ukraine.
How many Ukrainian refugees are registered for temporary protection in Hungary? Just over 46,000. Compare that with nearly one million in Poland or over 600,000 in the Czech Republic, as of summer 2024, according to the United Nations. From this we can see that Hungary is far less of a chosen destination for refugees than other EU countries, for whatever reason. The illiberal politics of populist leader Viktor Orbán aside, could one of the explanations be the notoriously difficult Magyar nyelv (Hungarian language)?
Language barriers
At the outbreak of war in 2022, just over one million Ukrainian refugees crossed into Hungary. They quickly established pop-up schools, with their own teachers giving lessons in Ukrainian (and English as a second language). It came as a shock to them to learn that they would have to start sending their children to Hungarian schools, as the law demands. At this point, the vast majority went elsewhere.
”We had some Ukrainians staying with us,” said one Hungarian couple. “They were nice and we managed to communicate in Russian. But they moved on to Germany. Language and better job prospects were probably the reasons.”
What is it about Hungarian that makes it so difficult? It’s not an Indo-European language like French, German or even Russian, but a member of the Finno-Ugric group (not that Finns and Hungarians can understand each other). For külföldiek (foreigners), this means there are almost no familiar-sounding words or associations to hang on to.
Learning Hungarian is like climbing a glass mountain. Using Google Translate helps a bit but you can end up with some very strange sentences.
It works the other way round too, when Hungarians are trying to learn foreign languages. Sadly, they say their language is their “cradle and coffin”, leaving them isolated in the world. You’ll find young people in Budapest who speak English and some older ones who know German or Russian. But two thirds of Hungary’s 10 million people speak only Hungarian, according to European parliament statistics.
This makes the effort they do make to absorb outsiders special, and the migrant and refugee success stories all the more remarkable.
Historic divisions
At a recent event in Budapest to mark World Refugee Day, UNHCR, the refugee agency, invited a small number of refugees to be part of a “living library”, where instead of reading books you could meet people who told their stories. There was Kafia Mahdi, a refugee from Somalia, who has become a successful fashion model in Hungary and starred in a film.
Her secret was that she came to Hungary as an unaccompanied minor and spent time in a children’s home, which made learning Hungarian a must. “That was how I picked up the language,” she said.
Bishop Miklós Beer, the retired Catholic Bishop of Vác, always used to speak up for refugees. But he explained the reluctance of some of his congregation to be more open and welcoming.
“You have to understand that Hungarians went through so much (Soviet domination in Communist times),” he said. “And now the attitude can sometimes be, ‘just leave us alone and let us live our way’.”
Which goes to show that when it comes to integration, both refugees and hosts need to understand not only where people are coming from geographically, but where they might be coming from historically, linguistically and psychologically.
Three questions to consider:
- How what makes immigrating to Hungary more difficult than it might be to immigrate to other European countries?
- In what way does Hungary’s history shape its attitude towards immigration?
- Why do you think many people expect refugees to master the language of a host country?
Helen Womack is a specialist on former Communist countries. From 1985 to 2015, she reported from Moscow for Reuters, The Independent, The Times and the Fairfax newspapers of Australia. Since the refugee crisis of 2015, she has written for the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, about how refugees are settling in Europe. After column writing, Womack went on to write a book about her experiences in Russia: “The Ice Walk — Surviving the Soviet Break-Up and the New Russia.”