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

150 László Szarka

munities falls under one per cent). From the Hungarian point of view, thus, we can define the language boundary in the following way: proceeding northwards from the Hungarian- Slovak state border villages and towns with a majority of Hungarian speaking population (over fifty, eighty and even above ninety five per cent) come as first. Within this zone, there are islands of Slovak majority population. Proceeding northward, approaching the language border, a growing number of ethnically mixed communities follow, inhabited by a majority of Slovak population. The language border is constituted by the chain of those villages and towns whose inhabitants are from 95 to 100 percent Slovaks; passing this line no communities with Hungarian majority or with ethnically mixed population can be found.

This, however, does not contradict the observation according to which the actual language borders are more and more to be searched inside communities, within single families. The number of those families (within the Hungarian population in Slovakia) for whom a particular kind of instinctive bilingualism constitutes their mother tongue, is increasing. In their cases, the language border needs to be repeatedly redefined in their everyday practices, when it is the language user alone who decides for this or that language depending on the situation and suitability.

Indeed, the Hungarian population of Slovakia with its administratively hardly unificable (east-west) location is a folk living in valleys (except for the two largest compact zones, the Medzibodrogie (Bodrogköz in Hungarian) and Žitný Ostrov (Csallóköz). These valleys11 have always been important factors in the settlement organising and have significantly affected the influence-spheres of towns, the marking of transport routes as well as the formation of the language border.

When measuring the assimilation processes along the language border we must also consider those factors which influenced the ethnic space in the twentieth century: the settling and administration policy of Czechoslovakia in the period between the two world wars; the changes that occurred in the situation of the Jewish population which in the past used to belong to the Hungarian speaking group; the holocaust and