New tasks in Hungarian dialectology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18349/MagyarNyelv.2026.2.205Keywords:
dialectology, traditional peasant farming, social changes, dialect data collection, historical overview, description of dialects todayAbstract
Given that traditional peasant farming and peasantry as a social class have ceased to exist, the most important life-giving medium of rural dialects has also come to an end. It is an open issue whether Hungarian rural dialects are indeed on the verge of disappearance. Experience shows that they do not disappear despite their convergence to the standard, even though their domain of use has decreased significantly, and has receded to the area of familiar language use in most cases. The study of its present-day situation is one of the most important tasks of dialectology, if not the single most important task. The main questions are: 1. How can synchronic dialectal data be collected today under these radically changed circumstances? 2. What has become of the former native language variants that existed between the standard language and the regional dialects? 3. What is the most pressing task for dialectology today?
References
Cseri Miklós – Kósa László – T. Bereczki Ibolya szerk. 2000. Paraszti múlt és jelen az ezredfordulón. MTA Néprajzi Kutatóintézet, Budapest.
Cseri Miklós – Kósa László – Bereczki Ibolya szerk. 2005. Utóparaszti hagyományok és modernizációs törekvések a magyar vidéken. MTA Néprajzi Kutatóintézet, Budapest.
Deme László – Imre Samu szerk. 1975. A Magyar nyelvjárások atlaszának elméleti-módszertani kérdései. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest.
Izsák Lajos 1998. Rendszerváltástól rendszerváltásig 1944–1990. Kulturtrade Kiadó, Budapest.
Kiss Jenő szerk. 2001. Magyar dialektológia. Osiris Kiadó, Budapest.
Kósa László 2025. A néprajztudomány szolgálatában. Magyar Néprajzi Társaság – Magyar Néprajzi Múzeum, Budapest.
Valuch Tibor 2005. A paraszti társadalomtól a falusi társadalomig. In: Ugyanő, Magyarország társadalomtörténete a XX. század második felében. Osiris Kiadó, Budapest. 188–212.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Jenő Kiss
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Magyar Nyelv is a Diamond Open Access periodical. Documents can be freely downloaded and duplicated in an electronic format, and can be used unchanged and with due reference to the original source. Such use must not serve commercial purposes. In the case of any form of dissemination and use, Hungarian Copyright Act LXXVI/1999 and related laws are to be observed. The electronic version of the journal is subject to the regulations of CC BY-NC-ND (Creative Commons – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives).
The journal permits its authors, at no cost and without any temporal limitation, to make pre-print copies of their manuscripts publicly available via email or in their own homepage or that of their institution, or in either closed or free-for-all repositories of their institutions/universities, or other non-profit websites, in the form accepted by the journal editor for publication and even containing amendments on the basis of reviewers’ comments. When the authors publicize their papers in this manner, they have to warn their readers that the manuscript at hand is not the final published version of the work. Once the paper has been published in a printed or online form, the authors are allowed (and advised) to use that (post-print) version for the above purposes. In that case, they have to indicate the exact location and other data of the journal publication. The authors retain the copyright of their papers; however, in the case of an occasional secondary publication, the bibliographical data of the first publication have to be included.
