Magyarization

Magyarization (also Magyarisation, Hungarization, Hungarisation, Hungarianization, Hungarianisation) was an assimilation or acculturation process by which non-Hungarian nationals came to adopt the Hungarian (also called "Magyar") culture and language, either voluntarily or due to social pressure, often in the form of a coercive policy.

In the era of national awakening, the Hungarian intellectuals transposed the concepts of the so-called "Political Nation" and Nation State from the Western European countries (especially the principles of the similarly highly multiethnic 18th century France), which included the idea of linguistic and cultural assimilation of minorities.

The Hungarian Nationalities Law (1868) guaranteed that all citizens of the Kingdom of Hungary (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), whatever their nationality, constituted politically "a single nation, the indivisible, unitary Hungarian nation", and there could be no differentiation between them except in respect of the official usage of the current languages and then only insofar as necessitated by practical considerations. In spite of the law, the use of minority languages was banished almost entirely from administration and even justice. Defiance of, or appeals to, the Nationalities Law met with derision or abuse. The Hungarian language was overrepresented in the primary schools and almost all secondary education was in Hungarian.

During the long nineteenth century, the Hungarian politicians and intellectuals stood firmly on the contemporary liberal conception of nationality question, which based solely on individualism. With the idea of individualism, they tried to reduce the minority question into a simple linguistic rights question, thus they denied the collective nationality rights and any plans for ethnic autonomous territories.

By the end of the 19th century, the state apparatus was entirely Hungarian in language, as were business and social life above the lowest levels. The Magyarization of the towns had proceeded at an astounding rate. Nearly all middle-class Jews and Germans and many middle-class Slovaks and Ruthenes had been Magyarized. The percentage of the population with Hungarian as its mother tongue grew from 46.6% in 1880 to 54.5% in 1910. The 1910 census (and the earlier censuses) did not register ethnicity, but mother tongue (and religion) instead, based on which it is sometimes subject to criticism. However, most of the Magyarization happened in the centre of Hungary and among the middle classes, who had access to education; and much of it was the direct result of urbanization and industrialization. It had hardly touched the rural populations of the periphery, and linguistic frontiers had not shifted significantly from the line on which they had stabilized a century earlier.

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