Fancsaly É., Gúti E., Kontra M., Molnár Ljubić M., Oszkó B., Siklósi B., Žagar Szentesi O. A magyar nyelv Horvátországban / szerk. M. Kontra. Budapest: Gondolat; Eszék: Media Hungarica Művelődési és Tájékoztatási Intézet, 2016. 306 o. [Fancsaly É., Gúti E., Kontra M., Molnár Ljubić M., Oszkó B., Žagar Szentesi O. The Hungarian Language in Croatia / ed. M. Kontra. Budapest:

Abstract

The review sheds light on the collective monograph published in 2016 by Hungarian and Croatian linguists on the sociolinguistic situation of the Hungarian community in Croatia, which is a continuation of the book series “Hungarian language in the Carpathian basin in the 20th century”. The monograph is an example of a quantitative study. The authors conducted an extensive questionnaire survey using participants from eight localities in Croatia. As a result, the following elements of the language situation were analyzed: language use in various fields, language prestige, and bilingual education. It is revealed that the number of Hungarians during the 20th century decreased rapidly. Fifteen variables were selected for linguistic analysis of the data, and these were chosen to reflect the most peculiar contact and dialect features in the speech of community under scrutiny. Unlike other regions with a Hungarian minority, there were many Hungarians in Baranja and Slavonia who stayed for a long time outside their homeland, but because of the war in the 90s they were forced to move to Hungary. Among all the rural communities, the most archaic dialects are found in four villages with Reformed populations in Slavonia, while in Catholic villages the Hungarians are descendants of later settlers from Bačka and from today’s Hungary and are thus more modern. The book will be of interest to linguists, ethnologists, and specialists in sociolinguistics.