Types, groups and landscapes in Moldavian Hungarian

Reconsidering an old question

Abstract

In his foundational article on the history of research on Moldavian Hungarians in 1959, drawing on linguistic geographic research projects carried out at the department in Cluj-Napoca, Attila Szabó T. concludes that three dialect groups can be discerned within the dialect region of Moldavian Hungarian: székelyes ‘Szekler-type’, északi ‘Northern’, and déli ‘Southern’. This final conclusion of his differs from the opinion of many previous authors who claimed that there are two types of Moldavian Hungarians: székely and magyar ‘Hungarian’. The terminology had also been confusing previously because the name Csángó was used to denote the original (Hungarian) group by some authors, while it was also used generally for all Moldavian Hungarians. The author of the present

paper argues that later linguistic geographic research shows the above tripartite classification to be incorrect, and the previously assumed duality is proven to be justified in terms of origin, dialect type, and territorial distribution. However, the two dialects continuously undergo dialect mixing, and are influenced even more by the dominant local Romanian dialect and the standard dialect of Romanian. Thus, the author proposes to use the names mezoségi ‘Grassland’ and székely ‘Szekler’ to express this duality.