Hungarian minority in Slovakia
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 458,467 (2011 census) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Southern Slovakia | |
| Languages | |
| mainly Hungarian and Slovak | |
| Religion | |
| Roman Catholicism 73%, Calvinism 16% and others. |
Hungarians in Slovakia are the largest ethnic minority in the country. According to the 2011 Slovak census, 458,467 people (or 8.5% of the population) declared themselves Hungarians, while 508,714 (9.4% of the population) stated that Hungarian was their mother tongue.
Hungarians in Slovakia are concentrated mostly in the southern part of the country, near the border with Hungary. They form the majority in two districts: Komárno and Dunajská Streda. According to the survey of the agency Polis from September 2015, 85.2% of the respondents evaluate mutual relationships between the majority population and the Hungarian minority as "good", only 7.6% as "bad", and 7.2% were unable to answer.
After the defeat of the Central Powers in the Western Front in 1918, the Treaty of Trianon was signed between the winning Entente powers and Hungary in 1920, at the Paris Peace Conference. The treaty greatly reduced the Kingdom of Hungary's borders, including ceding all of Upper Hungary, where Slovaks made up the dominant ethnicity, to Czechoslovakia. In consideration of the strategic and economic interests of their new ally Czechoslovakia, however, the victorious allies set the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border further south than the Slovak-Hungarian language border. Consequently, the newly created state contained areas that were overwhelmingly ethnic Hungarian.
According to the 1910 census conducted in Austria–Hungary, there were 884,309 ethnic Hungarians, constituting 30.2% of the population, in what is now Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine. The Czechoslovak census of 1930 recorded 571,952 Hungarians. (In the 2001 census, by contrast, the percentage of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia was 9.7%, a decrease of two thirds in percentage but not in absolute number, which remained roughly the same.)
Czechoslovak and Hungarian censuses become target of discussion with political impact, but they were not fully compliant and they did not measure the same data. According to official Hungarian definition from 1900, a "mother tongue" was defined as a language "considered by a person as his own, the best spoken and mostly preferred". This definition did not match the real definition of mother tongue, introduced subjective factors dependent on environment and opened way for various interpretations. More, in the atmosphere of raising magyarization a person could risk if he did not declare Hungarian language to be his favorite for a census commissar. Between 1880–1910, Hungarian population increased by 55.9%, but Slovak only by 5.5% while Slovak had higher birth rate at the same time. Level of differences does not allow to explain this process by emigration (higher among Slovaks) or by population moves and natural assimilation during industrialization. In 16 northern counties, Hungarian population raised by 427,238 while majority Slovak population only by 95,603. Number of "Hungarians who can speak Slovak" unusually increased in time when Hungarians really had no motivation to learn it – by 103 445 in southern Slovakia in absolute numbers, by 100% in Pozsony, Nyitra, Komárom, Bars and Zemplén County and more than 3 times in Košice. After the creation of Czechoslovakia, people could declare their nationality more freely.
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