The essive-modal case is a case in the

Hungarian language Hungarian, or Magyar (, ), is an Ugric language of the Uralic language family spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighboring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Out ...

that expresses either the state, capacity, task in which somebody is or which somebody has ( essive case, e.g. "as a reward", "for example"), or the manner in which an action is carried out, an event happens, or the language which somebody knows ( modal case, e.g. "sloppily", "unexpectedly", "speak ''German''"). It is sometimes called the essive case. An example of this would be in the sentence "Beszélek magyarul." (I speak Hungarian.) The sentence denotes the ability of being able to speak the Hungarian language. According to

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

rules, ul becomes ül in cases such as "Beszélek németül." (I speak German.) because the word for "German", ''német'' is composed completely of median and/or frontal vowels.

References

Grammatical cases {{Ling-morph-stub