István Csernicskó—Miklós Kontra: Recognition of the Contact Varieties of Hungarian as Legitimate

Although millions of Hungarians had been living as minorities in Hungary’s neighboring countries since 1920, it was only after the collapse of communism in 1990 that Hungarian linguists on both sides of the state borders began to seriously study the contact varieties of the language and their similarities to and differences from Hungary-Hungarian. The first large-scale research project was conducted in 1995‒97 in Hungary and in all the neighboring countries (see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265453574_The_Sociolinguistics_of_Hungarian_Outside_Hungary).

To date, five volumes of the book series The Hungarian Language in the Carpathian Basin at the End of the 20th Century have been published. The fierce debate between purist Hungarian language cultivators and sociolinguists has resulted in the general recognition of Hungarian as a pluricentric language. Since 2001, electronic corpora and a few print dictionaries have been created “to bridge the gaps” (Hungarian: határtalanítás) between Hungary-Hungarian, Slovakia-Hungarian, Ukraine-Hungarian, Romania-Hungarian etc.