A magyar nyelv Ukrajnában (Kárpátalján) by István Csernicskó, and: A magyar nyelv Jugoszláviában (Vajdaságban) by Lajos Göncz, and: A magyar nyelv Szlovákiában by István Lanstyák (review)

These are the first three volumes of a series reporting on the findings of a seven-country research project on the status of the Hungarian language in the countries surrounding Hungary. Based on a large-scale empirical study and using a control group of Hungarians in Hungary, this research project aims to describe the sociolinguistic and contact linguistic situation of Hungarian in Central European countries where it is spoken as a minority language. It combines a macro-sociolinguistic outlook with a variationist sociolinguistic search for patterns of stratified language use. The minority Hungarian populations in question—in Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Austria, and Slovakia—are all autochthonous to their areas and date their minority status to 1920, when the Treaty of Trianon placed them outside Hungary’s newly redrawn political borders. The research project, led by Miklós Kontra, is the first attempt to gain comparable empirical data on and to provide a refined picture of the state of the Hungarian language in Central Europe, where research on minority languages has been scarce and views of them have often been driven by majority bias.

The project, for which the data collection was carried out in 1996, uses a unified questionnaire inquiring about 324 sociolinguistic and 60 linguistic variables and has targeted a total of 846 subjects (between 60 and 216 per country, depending on the size of the Hungarian population), stratified by age, sex, residence, and education. The linguistic variables comprise general sociolinguistic variables present in Hungarian speech communities both inside and outside of Hungary and contact features of varieties of Hungarian spoken outside Hungary. The project is up-to-date in its sociolinguistic methodology and incorporates current approaches to language contact research (e.g. from Goebl et al.’s Contact linguistics encyclopedia, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997). The authors of the three volumes are minority Hungarian linguists living and working in the respective countries they write about.

The three volumes are parallel reports on Hungarians and their language use in Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and Slovakia. They present comprehensive descriptions of the demographic, geographic, and historical details of minority Hungarian speakers as well as the political, economic, religious, and cultural aspects of their life. The books also report on the various aspects of the bilingual existence of these minority Hungarians—language use, bilingual education, codeswitching patterns, language attitudes, linguistic identity, etc. The authors provide a wealth of information and analyses sensitive to local issues and characteristics. Unfortunately for readers interested in the linguistic aspects of these language contact situations, the volumes do not provide the same depth in describing the linguistic effects of contact across the three reports: While almost half of the volume on Yugoslavia is devoted to such a discussion, the ones on Slovakia and Ukraine devote only 35 and 4 pages, respectively.

The three volumes are important documents of Hungarian sociolinguistics and language contact research on Hungarian which would make valuable empirical resources for all linguists interested in sociolinguistics and contact linguistics. Hopefully, their findings might be available to a wider range of readers, in English, soon.