Sredzkistraße

Ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia to be fined for speaking their own language

Daniel Tencer has posted his English translation of an article in Gazeta Wyborcza from Warsaw, Poland, which describes a new law which imposes a fine of five to ten thousand euros for publicly speaking Hungarian in Slovakia:

Ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia are planning to protest today in the city of Dunajska Streda against a law they say violates their basic human rights. Under a penalty of five to ten thousand Euros, as of today it will be a crime in Slovakia to use the Hungarian language in public places.

As the Hungarian weekly Heti Világgazdaság states, every Hungarian doctor in Slovakia will from now on be required to speak Slovakian with their patients, even ethnically Hungarian patients, even if neither party wishes it so.

[Explanatory note: There are 550,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia. They are there because after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in World War I, the Allied Powers drew the borders of Hungary in such a way as to marginalize the Hungarian nation. A full 3.3 million Hungarians were left out of Hungary, and have been living as minorities in Slovakia, Romania, etc. for the past ninety years.]

The protest marks the culmination of several nightmarish weeks in Hungarian-Slovak relations, during which time the Slovak government refused entry to the Hungarian prime minister, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences declared the new Slovak language law a violation of fundamental human rights.

It’s always a thorny issue when governments get involved in mandating and prescribing the use of language in their respective societies, but it’s surprised me that such an incredibly racist law brought in in Eastern Europe has gone almost completely unnoticed in the news media — especially when one considers the background to the Hungarians’ presence in Slovakia.

Edit: Ah. Literally minutes after I clicked “Publish” (I didn’t know my blog was that closely watched! ;) ), a story about this appeared in the third most prominant position on the BBC News website.