Hungarian phonology

The phonology of the Hungarian language is notable for its process of vowel harmony, the frequent occurrence of geminate consonants and the presence of otherwise uncommon palatal stops.
Consonants.
This is the standard Hungarian consonantal system, using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Almost every consonant may be geminated, written by doubling a single letter grapheme: for , for , for etc., or by doubling the first letter of a grapheme cluster: for , for , etc.
The phonemes and can appear on the surface as geminates: "bridzs" ('bridge'). (For the list of examples and exceptions, see Hungarian dz and dzs.)
Hungarian orthography, unlike that of the surrounding Slavic languages, does not use "háčky" or any other consonant diacritics. Instead, the letters "c, s, z" are used alone (, , ) or combined in the digraphs "cs, sz, zs" (, , ), while "y" is used only in the digraphs "ty, gy, ly, ny" as a palatalization marker to write the sounds , , (formerly ), .
The most distinctive allophones are:
Vowels.
Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. Their "phonetic" values do not exactly match up with each other, so represents and represents ; likewise, represents while represents . For the other pairs, the short vowels are slightly lower and more central, and the long vowels more peripheral:
The sound marked by is considered to be by Tamás Szende and by Mária Gósy. Gósy also mentions a different short that contrasts with both and , present in a few words like "Svájc" ('Switzerland'), "svá ('schwa'), advent" ('advent'), "hardver" ('hardware', this usage is considered hyperforeign), and "halló" (used when answering the phone; contrasting with "haló" 'dying', and "háló" 'web').
There are two more marginal sounds, namely the long as well as the long . They are used in the name of the letters "E" and "A", which are pronounced and , respectively.
Although not found in Standard Hungarian, some dialects contrast three mid vowels , , and , with the latter being written in some works, but not in the standard orthography. Thus "mentek" could represent four different words: "mëntëk" ('you all go'), "mëntek" ('they went'), "mentëk" ('I save'), and "mentek" ('they are exempt'). In Standard Hungarian, the first three collapse to , while the latter one is unknown, having a different form in the literary language ("mentesek").
Vowel harmony.
As in Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian, vowel harmony plays an important part in determining the distribution of vowels in a word. Hungarian vowel harmony classifies the vowels according to front vs. back assonance and rounded vs unrounded for the front vowels. Excluding recent loanwords, Hungarian words have either only back vowels or front vowels due to these vowel harmony rules.
While , , , and are all front unrounded vowels, they are considered to be "neutral vowels" in Hungarian vowel harmony. Therefore, if a word contains back vowels, neutral vowels may appear alongside them. However, if only neutral vowels appear in a stem, the stem is treated as though it is of front vowel assonance and all suffixes must contain front vowels.
Vowel harmony in Hungarian is most notable when observing suffixation. Vowel harmony must be maintained throughout the entire word, meaning that most suffixes have variants. For example, the dative case marker vs. . Stems that contain back vowels affix back vowel suffixes, and stems that contain only front vowels affix front vowel suffixes. However, the front vowel stems distinguish rounded vs. unroundedness based on the last vowel in the stem. If the last vowel is front and rounded, it takes a suffix with a front rounded vowel; otherwise it follows the standard rules. While suffixes for most words have front/back vowel variants, there are not many that have rounded/unrounded variants, indicating that this is a rarer occurrence.
One is able to observe the distinction when looking at the plural affix, either (back), (front unrounded), or (front rounded).
As can be seen above, the neutral vowels are able to be in both front and back vowel assonance words with no consequence.
However, there are about fifty monosyllabic roots that only contain , , or that take a back vowel suffix instead of the front vowel suffix.
These exceptions to the rule are hypothesized to have originated from the roots originally having contained a phoneme no longer present in modern Hungarian, the unrounded back vowel , or its long counterpart . It is theorized that while these vowels merged with or , less commonly or , the vowel harmony rules sensitive to the backness of the original sound remained in place. The theory finds support from etymology: related words in other languages generally have back vowels, often specifically unrounded back vowels. For example, "nyíl" 'arrow' (plural "nyíl-ak") corresponds to Komi ньыл , Southern Mansi .
Assimilation.
The overall characteristics of the consonant assimilation in Hungarian are the following:
Voice assimilation.
In a cluster of consonants ending in an obstruent, all obstruents change their voicing according to the last one of the sequence. The affected obstruents are the following:
Nasal place assimilation.
Nasals assimilate to the place of articulation of the following consonant (even across word boundaries):
Palatal assimilation.
Combination of a "palatalizable" consonant and a following palatal consonant results in a palatal geminate. Palatalizable consonants are palatal ones and their non-palatal counterparts: "d" ~ "gy" , "l" ~ "ly" , "n" ~ "ny" , "ty" ~ "t" .
Degemination.
Long consonants become short when preceded or followed by another consonant, e.g. "folttal" 'by/with (a) patch', "varrtam" 'I sewed'.
Intercluster elision.
The middle alveolar stops may be omitted in clusters with more than two consonants, depending on speed and articulation of speech: "azt hiszem" ~ 'I presume/guess', "mindnyájan" 'one and all', "különbség" ~ 'difference'. In morpheme onsets like "str-" , middle stops tends to be more stable in educated speech, "falanxstratégia" ~ ~ 'strategy based on phalanxes'.
Elision of.
 also tends to be omitted between a preceding vowel and an adjacent stop or affricate in rapid speech, causing the lengthening of the vowel or diphthongization (e.g. "volt" 'was', "polgár" 'citizen'). This is quite common in dialectal speech, but considered non-standard in the official language.
Hiatus.
Standard Hungarian prefers hiatus between adjacent vowels. However some optional dissolving features can be observed:
Stress.
The stress is on the first syllable of the word. The articles "a", "az", "egy", and the particle "is" are usually unstressed.