Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)

Interethnic spaces

136 Károly Tóth

Table 10: Ethnic structure of children attending the village kindergarten and the schools15

Number of children%

Hungarian kindergarten

18

62,06

Slovak kindergarten

11

37,94

Hungarian school (1.-IV.grades)

20

66,66

Slovak school (l.-IV.)

10

33,33

I mentioned above that back in the 1970s it was common in the village that Slovaks who married into the village had to learn Hungarian if they wanted to adapt to the community. Today the situation is reversed: even the offspring of the strongest Hungarian families are forced onto an assimilation path if they live in mixed marriages. They usually maintain their mother tongue only in interaction with their parents. However, with their own children they only rarely do in the same way. In most of the cases their children’s first language is Slovak. In this sense mixed marriages mean mixed language use and ultimately, within a couple of years, it also means a complete change of language. If to this trend we add the village's low birth-rate (which has stagnated for many years) and the high death rate16, as the result of the ageing process, the above described tendencies seem irreversible.

“We were brought by the stork, they by the train”

There is a saying in the village, not said aloud very often, though well known by everyone. It belongs to the category of harmless and jovial everyday nationalism; it says: “We were brought by the stork, they by the train”. It is obvious that the word "they” stands for immigrant Slovaks, expressing the simple fact that "we” were born here and “they” “only” came here.

Changes in the last decades seem more and more to disprove of saying. In this village on the ethnic periphery we are witnessing a process that involves nearly all components of natural assimilation (ageing, ethnically-mixed marriages, depopulation, families without descendants, and employment