Demographic Features of the National and Ethnic Minorities
Demographic Features of the National and Ethnic Minorities
Act LXXVII of 1993 on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities states:
“It is the individual’s exclusive and inalienable right to take on and declare their affiliation to a national or ethnic group or minority. Nobody is obliged to proclaim that they belong to a minority group.”
According to the 1990 census, a total of 232,751 persons in a population of 10,374,823 indicated minority affiliation, and 137,724 stated that their native language was one of the national or ethnic minority languages.
Estimates from researchers and minority organizations indicate that the actual number of national and ethnic minorities is greater: individual groups are reckoned to comprise from a few thousand persons up to nearly half a million.
The difference between the estimated and declared figures can be explained on the one hand by historical, social and psychological reasons related to minority issues in Central-Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the figures reflect the minorities’ emotional and cultural duality dilemma: many feel themselves to be equally Hungarian and a minority, but the opportunity to record and state this was not available in the 1990 census.
To a certain extent it is possible to track minority affiliation on the basis of three questions posed in the 1990 census: nationality, native language and spoken language. Answers given by the minorities to these three criteria allow us to draw some conclusions as to ethnic affiliation. Admission of nationality affiliation does not directly presume an acquaintance with the native language. The language acquired during childhood and the language generally spoken in the family is meant by native language, but at the same time a part of the population speaking a minority native language profess themselves to be of Hungarian nationality. Besides these two criteria, additional information can be extracted by taking into account which other languages besides the native language are spoken if the minority language is not a commonly taught or internationally used language.
However, these latter data will refer not only to minorities who do not ‘declare’ themselves, but it can also include those people of Hungarian nationality who were resettled in, or who fled to, Hungary, and who also speak the language of the state in which they used to live.
