Slavic Loanwords in the Speech of Transcarpathian Hungarians as a Result of the First One Thousand Days of the Russo-Ukrainian War

Abstract

Transcarpathia is one of the westernmost counties of Ukraine with a Hungarian minority population consisting of more than 151,000 people, based on the last official census data from 2001. The local Hungarian language variety is different from standard Hungarian, spoken within the borders of Hungary, mainly in terms of vocabulary. The reason for this is that local Hungarians frequently borrow words from the language of the dominant nation of the country, i.e., Ukrainian. The number of Slavic loanwords has been increased by sociopolitical changes resulting from the Russo–Ukrainian war. In the present study, borrowings which are directly connected to the antecedents and consequences of the armed conflict are summarized on the basis of the Termini Hungarian–Hungarian Dictionary and Database. The aim of this paper is to present how a minority language variety can be influenced by the dominant language of the country in a few years of sociopolitical turmoil. In an international context, this might facilitate our understanding of the connection between language change, lexical borrowings, and military conflicts.

Keywords

• Hungarian minority
• Russo–Ukrainian war
• Slavic loanwords
• Termini Hungarian–Hungarian Dictionary and Database
• Transcarpathia