How to be polite in Hungarian?

The courtesy system of the Hungarian language

Do you know how to be polite in Hungarian? Even the native Hungarian speakers learn about it in elementary and high school – so did I –, but due to the fact that Hungarian is our native language and we use it every day, we learn only the basics of the honorific system in Hungarian.

The base is that there are two speaking levels, magázódás (formal) and tegeződés (informal). This is taught in school, and most of the Hungarians never think about that actually the whole system is more complex and difficult, because the language has more levels and other honorifics as well, but these are not in the curriculum.

In fact, gramatically there are indeed only two levels, as for formal speech we use the singular 3. or plural 3. forms of the verbs, while informal speech is obviously the singular 2. and plural 2. cases. However, within the formal level, there are more sub-levels, according to which pronoun we use – and yes, it does make difference in politeness. Please note that in Hungarian it’s not always necessary to put a pronoun into a sentence, when the ’who talks to whom about what’ is clear, that’s why there are only two grammatical levels and differences only in the pronouns. So the whole system is like this:

formal / magázódás	önözés
	magázás
	kendezés
	tetszikezés
	„címezés”
informal / tegeződés	tegezés

Önözés (pronoun: sin. ön; plur. önök):

This is the polite formal level. It can be used to almost everybody – elder or higher ranked people and strangers as well. However, Hungarians tend to avoid its use in some situtations, mostly when we speak to higher ranked persons face to face.

Magázás (pronoun: sin. maga; plur. maguk):

Magázás is the less polite formal level. Basically it is used by higher ranked to lower ranked, for example by university professors to address students – a student can never use magázás to a teacher, that’d be considered extremly rude. In some cases it also can express the speakers intention to keep the distance from the listener.

Kendezés (pronoun: sin. kend, kegyed; plur. kendtek, kegyelmetek):

Kendezés is a polite formal, though a little archaic speech level, but it’s still spoken in the countryside and for example, in some areas of Transylvania. The pronouns are the shortened forms of kegyelmed, meaning ’your grace’ – it’s a little funny, because the pronoun itself is in informal form. Nowadays I never hear kend on the streets, but kegyed is still used sometimes by men to address women – depending on the situation, it can be very polite and/or respectfully jollier at the same time.

Tetszikezés (pronoun: –):

Tetszikezés is used by youngers to address or when speaking about elders – children and even adults use tetszikezés to aged people. ’Tetszik’ literally means ’you like it’ or ’it pleases you’, but here it functions as an auxiliary. Most of the situations we don’t use a pronoun; and, in fact, we can say that tetszikezés is not exactly the same as the other sub-levels of formal speech, since it uses auxiliary and not different pronouns.

Example: „Hogy tetszik lenni?” (Literally ’How do you like to be?’, but means ’How are you?’)

„Címezés” (pronoun: –; instead the title, rank, etc. of the listener):

’Címezés’ is not the proper phrase, and since there’s no official Hungarian name of this phenomenon, I have to name it but I cannot come up with something better. It is a formal and polite level, but one can use it when the exact rank, title, etc. of the listener is known – as you already guessed, in most of the cases lower ranked uses it to address higher ranked, but rarely (when instead of the rank the listener’s name is said) it’s equal to önözés.

Example 1. (with a rank): „A főigazgató úr mit gondol erről?” (Literally ’What does the principal director think about it?’, but means ’Principal director, what do you think about it?’)

Example 2. (with a name): „Katalin tudna vetni rá egy pillantást?” (Literally ’Could Katalin take a look at it?’, but means ’Katalin, could you take a look at it?’)

There are many other rules, such as the additon of „úr” (’sir’) and others to the title or rank and other forms of address exist as well, but these were the basic grammatical rules of polite speech in Hungarian.

Thank you for reading this not-so-interesting, but really long post.

by Alla