Hungarian

Hungarian is spoken by around thirteen million people in Hungary and in large communities across Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. It is the language of Budapest's thermal baths and ruin bars, of paprika, lángos and Tokaji wine, and of a literature and film tradition far bigger than the country's size would suggest.

It is not related to the languages around it. Hungarian is Uralic, a distant cousin of Finnish and Estonian, so almost nothing sounds familiar at first. In return it is beautifully regular. It is spelled exactly as it is said, the stress always falls on the first syllable, and there is no grammatical gender at all. The challenge is the endings: instead of prepositions, Hungarian glues meaning onto the end of the word, so a házban is in the house and a házból is out of the house.