6.1 Background

Hungarian is an Uralic (Finno-Ugric, Ugric) language spoken by around 15 million people in Hungary and (as a minority language) in several of the surrounding states. As shown in (19) the obstruent system of Hungarian is bifurcated in the way that is familiar from Germanic and Romance (Kenesei et al., 1998; Siptár & Törkenczy, 2000). 2 According to Kenesei et al.(1998) the fortis stops and affricates of Hungarian are voiceless unaspirated while its lenis stops are prevoiced, and this is corroborated by acoustic data (Meyer & Gombocz, 1909; Gósy, 1999). The same authors characterise the parallel contrast in the fricative inventory as voiceless vs. voiced.