HUNGARIANS IN SLOVENIA.   Term Paper ID:28815 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Discusses issues of ethnic identity; history & current status of Hungarians in Slovenia. Demographic make-up of Slovenia.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Discusses issues of ethnic identity; history & current status of Hungarians in Slovenia. Demographic make-up of Slovenia. Paper Introduction: One of the great questions facing any people who are an ethnic minority in their own society is whether they should try to preserve their sense of ethnicity, their sense of apartness, or if they should attempt to merge their own sense of ethnicity into a greater sense of nationality. This paper examines the status of Hungarians in Slovenia, how they have maintained their sense of self amid a larger population that is not always sympathetic to the ethnic identity of its subpopulations. In order to understand the position in which Hungarians in Slovenia Hungary find themselves, it may be useful to understand more broadly the history of Slovenia itself. It is important to note that a very large measure of ethnic identity comes from understanding how one is different from one’s neighbors. People not only define themselves as like their families and other membe Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Ethnicenclaves are more likely to stand out in relatively ethnically homogeneoussocieties, and the members of ethnic minority groups in general face agreater pressure to assimilate the more homogeneous the society is. The Hungarians in Slovenia are ethnically Magyars, A Finno-Ugricpeople. Nor, ofcourse, is it necessarily desirable that they should be. In the course of its migrations, the languageacquired many loan words, mostly from languages of the Turkic group andfrom Iranian languages spoken in or near the Caucasus. But bycontinuing to speak their own language - even as younger Hungarians learnSlovenian so that they can participate in the larger society - andespecially by maintaining small private rituals of identity such as cookingtraditional foods and singing Slovenian songs handed down through oraltradition from one generation to the next, they maintain a sense of wherethey have come from, and their unique pathway to the future, one that willbe defined in large part by their past. The maintenance of regional and ethnic languages is made more complexboth for the ethnic minorities themselves and for the Slovenian governmentby the fact that Hungarians (and other ethnic minorities) are spread acrossthe country. It is interesting to note that while Hungariansoften have to struggle to maintain their sense of ethnic identity inSlovenia, but the converse is true as well, as the many Slovenians who haveemigrated to Hungary or gotten displaced by changing national boundariesoften struggle to maintain their sense of "Slovenianess" in Hungary. The basic stock of ordinary words,however, is Finno-Ugric. When Rome lost control of Pannonia at the end of the 4thcentury, it was occupied first by Germanic tribes, then by Slavs. Martin's.Godkin, E. These autochthonous (that is indigenous) Italians and Magyarsenjoy legally guaranteed rights, including parliamentary representation(Benderley, 1996, p. But helping my mother make the same kind of bread that I knew she had learned to make from her mother and her grandmother, reading recipes for dinners written out in Hungarian, singing songs in Hungarian as we cooked - all of these things reminded me that I was not like all of the other Slovenians. In order to understand the position in which Hungarians in SloveniaHungary find themselves, it may be useful to understand more broadly thehistory of Slovenia itself. We would go to church for a special service and then we would go a community hall or out to see a parade, but it didn't really connect with me to my own life. (2 ). Independent Slovenia: Origins, movements, prospects. The languages most closely related to Hungarian areVogul and Ostyak, spoken near the Ob' River in westernmost Siberia. Slovenian is written in the Latinalphabet - unlike Serbian and many other Slavic languages, which arewritten in the Cyrillic alphabet - and has many dialects. New Have: Yale University.Hankiss. This long-standing mixture of ethnicities (which changes overtime but has never tended toward a high level of homogeneity) has given theSlovenes substantial practice in maintaining their sense of self amid ahetereogeneous society (Benderly, 1996, p. The Hungarian Media's War of Independence. Hungary itself came into existence when the Magyarsoccupied the middle basin of the Danube River in the late 9th century AD.Parts of this territory had formed the ancient Roman provinces of Pannoniaand Dacia. P. Ethnic Studies 18 (3), pp. J1367). ReferencesBenderley, Jull. However, it should be pointed out that the Slovenian government givesspecial rights to the Magyars and Italians within its borders, especiallyin the areas of self governance and linguistic autonomy. It should be noted that despite linguistic kinship with people fromthe Balkan Peninsula, the Slovenes are culturally an Alpine folk who havemore in common with northern Italians, southern Germans, and the Swiss(Benderley, 1996, p. 119). 19, pp. 81). Despite more than 7 years of affiliation with Yugoslavia, Slovene culture exhibits manysimilarities to Germanic cultures. E. 37). This bodes well for Hungariansliving in Slovenia: They should be able to use their language to keep asense of self-identity even as it changes to meet their new circumstances(Godkin, 1992, p. It is important to note that a very largemeasure of ethnic identity comes from understanding how one is differentfrom one's neighbors. 19-26.Oltay, M. In addition, mostpeople in Slovenia are Roman Catholic. (1998). Thesubsequent history of Dacia is unrecorded. Hungarians are more able to keep their sense of ethnicidentity in Slovenia than in, for example, England in part because of thestrong Austrian influence on both Slovene and Magyar culture (Godkin, 1992,p. Estonians and Slovenians on Top, The Baltic Review, Vol. New York: St. J1367. The issue of Hungarians living in Slovenia. After 9 a numberof words were borrowed from some Romance languages, from Slavic, fromOttoman-Turkish, and from German. It is interesting to note that Hungarian acquiredmany technical terms during the 19th century; these were created bylanguage innovators to permit discussions in Hungarian of Western Europeantechnology, science, and philosophy and has been able to do so withoutlosing its sense of linguistic purity. Hungarians living in Slovenia haveunderstood the importance of maintaining their own language. Although some of Slovenia's minorities live in largerconcentrations in particular counties and regions (including in some casesSlovenians), their situation is better characterized by geographicalfragmentation in which no one area boasts a regional language that isspoken exclusively (Racz, 2 , personal communication). The history of Hungary and the Magyars. Journal of the Center for Social Studies, Vol. One of the most important aspects of the experience of Hungarians inSlovenia to consider is the general demographic make-up of Slovenia. Unlike other Slavic cultures, Slovenes have been heavily influenced byGerman and Austrian cultures for nearly a millennium. The 1954 agreement over Trieste has left a fewthousand Italian speakers in Istria, and Prekmurje has a small Hungarianminority. Ethnic powderkegs. (1993). 29). 24-49.Racz, Y. Proto-Hungarian separated from its congener languages more than 2 years ago and gradually migrated toward the West, reaching its presentlocation about AD9 . Personal communication. By maintaining traditional costumes, festivals,languages, religious practices and other aspects of traditional culture,people define themselves as being a part of an easily identifiable groupand at the same time are able to define others who do not share thesetraits as not belonging to their group. People not only define themselves as like theirfamilies and other members of their own communities, but define themselvesin opposition to the members of other ethnic groups, other religions, otherlinguistic groups. It is perhaps the mostimportant single step that people belonging to an ethnic minority can taketo preserve their sense of self identity to maintain their connections totheir own language. 13-18.Hungarian Government Report No. In addition, in the mid-199 s Slovenia was home to some 2 , refugees from the war in Bosnia andHerzegovina. Thus Hungarians have as historicallycomplicated a political history as do the Slovenians (Godkin, 1992. "When I was a child I remember a lot of the time that I wouldn't even know what a festival was about. Ethnic Serbs (about 2 percent),Croats (about 3 percent), and various other ethnic groups (about 7 percent)constitute the remainder of Slovenia's population. But what we did at home was how we knew Hungarians really were like (Racz, 2 , personal communication. It might be notedthat this stands in contrast to the Hungarian government's policy ofrestricting minority languages, although in recent years, the Hungariangovernment has relaxed its restrictions on minority languages and nowidentical legal regulations guarantee the protection of languages spoken bythe 13 minorities listed in the Hungarian legal codes (Hungarian GovernmentReport No. (1996). The festivals of manyethnic and national groups are credited with the preservation of uniquecustoms, folktales, costumes, and culinary skills, for a festival is notmerely what happens in the public arena but also extends to all of thoseways in which the members of a group celebrate in private. 22). 112). More than 9 percent of Slovenia's people are ethnically Slovene.German speakers, who formed the elite during the Habsburg era, vanishedentirely after World War II. Hungarian is a very different language, whichhas put pressure on young Hungarians living in Slovenia to learn theSlovenian dialects. What we did in public was to show other people the way in which we think that Hungarians acted. Slovene is a South Slavic language, along withSerbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian, but it also has affinities toWest Slavic Czech and Slovak. This highly mixed nature of Slovenian society allows Hungarians anumber of niches in which to fit in, and the long association of Hungarianculture with Austrian culture allows Hungarians living in Slovenia agreater sense of belonging than they might in a state with less of a commonshared past. One of the great questions facing any people who are an ethnicminority in their own society is whether they should try to preserve theirsense of ethnicity, their sense of apartness, or if they should attempt tomerge their own sense of ethnicity into a greater sense of nationality.This paper examines the status of Hungarians in Slovenia, how they havemaintained their sense of self amid a larger population that is not alwayssympathetic to the ethnic identity of its subpopulations. (1997).Kalvet, T. (1993). The central plains had formedthe bases of nomadic immigrant peoples from the steppes north of the BlackSea - Huns, Bulgars, Avars - some of whom extended their domination fartherafield. The Avars, who dominated the basin in the 7th and 8th centuries,were crushed in about 8 by Charlemagne, whose successors organized thewestern half of the area in a chain of Slavic vassal "dukedoms." By theninth century, the Byzantine Empire and Bulgaria exercised loose authorityover the south and east of the area. Hungarians in Slovenia change their sense of ethnic identity becauseof their position as an ethnic minority in a larger society. In an interview Yvonne Racz, whose Hungarian family emigrated toSlovenia when she was a young child, said that the small, private ritualsthat her family participated in in conjunction with larger ethnic ritualshas helped her maintain a sense of herself as both Slovenian and Hungarian(her father is ethnically Magyar while her mother is Slovenian). Not only is the language itself important, but when anethnic group loses its fluency in its original language, it may well alsolose the ability to conduct traditional religious rituals and folkfestivals, to sing traditional songs, to understand the lullabies, prayersand even recipes of its ancestors. (1992). The political boundaries, and political complexities, of this regionof Europe have been so complex for such a long period of history that is itno longer possible to draw national boundaries in such a way that differentethnic groups will be separated into different geographic areas. Modern festivals and feasts centering on the customs of national orethnic groups enrich understanding of their heritage. 24 (4), pp. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

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