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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

ethnic change, Slovakia, Magyarization, demography

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Geography

Abstract

At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Trianon divided the former Austro-Hungarian Empire into multiple autonomous states including Czechoslovakia. Hungarians vociferously decried the southern border around the Slovak portion of this state, which became the independent Slovak Republic in 1993, claiming that it bisected an ethnically homogeneous Hungarian area between two political states. Conversely, proponents of the 1918 border argued that the dominant Hungarian presence in southern Slovakia was merely the result of Magyarization, a government policy aimed at suppressing minorities and forcefully assimilating them into Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) culture. Unfortunately, at this time nobody definitively knew where various ethnic groups in southern Slovakia resided prior to the implementation of Magyarization in the nineteenth century. Thus no conclusions could then be reached concerning the effects of Magyarization upon Slovakia’s ethnic demography.

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