This thesis explores the characteristics of English and its position as a lingua franca, as well as the language attitudes of Hungarian English-speaking students, based on an online questionnaire. Additionally, the properties and types of bilingualism are discussed in the beginning of the thesis. Respective to this research, the following three questions were initially: 1) to what extent do Hungarian students find knowing English important, 2) what difficulties do they think could arise during learning for a Hungarian speaker and 3) how do they judge Hungarian as a language compared to English. Based on the results, the attitudes of the participants proved to be overwhelmingly positive towards English, and the reasons are explored through the course of this thesis.