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
Border region or contact zone 147 sides, with regard to their economy, transport system and social and cultural life. On the Czechoslovak side the interested regions fell behind in the sphere of transport network, regional development and investments. Every seven-eight years the administration underwent reorganisation. This situation was also a result of ethnic differentiation. After the collectivisation in the fifties, a mass of population (from its big part ethnic Hungarians) gushed from villages to towns. However, it was only in the 1960s that these towns became capable to accept and gradually assimilate these masses. On the Hungarian side of the border, similar changes were caused by the big number of missing towns that found themselves on the Slovak side, by roads leading to “nowhere", by missed or delayed investments due to the lack of commercial and industrial centres. Thus, in the past eight decades, on both sides of the state border the trauma of the separation was replaced by the experience of “failure”, i.e. by a peripheral existence, due to common historical and foreign political reasons on the one hand, and to diverse economic and home politics factors, on the other hand. As the consequence of decades-long strict restrictions on border crossing and contact keeping, it was not possible to counterbalance the disadvantages of the peripheral state either with transit or with intensive border-crossing contacts. The Hungarian-Slovak language border The language border starts under Bratislava in the western edge of Csallóköz, dividing even today - with interruptions7- the Hungarian from the Slovak language zone for a length of 450 km. Over centuries this language border underwent numerous alterations. However, it is only in Slovakia and in the Transcarpathian Ukraine that the Hungarian language border, as a linguistic geographical phenomenon, has remained so extended and so clearly definable.
