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Magyarization (also "Magyarisation", "Hungarisation", "Hungarization", "Hungarianization", "Hungarianisation") is a designator applied to a number of ethnic assimilation policies implemented by various Hungarian authorities in the 19th century and at the beginning of 20th century. These policies aimed at imposing or maintaining the dominance of Hungarian language and culture in Hungarian-ruled regions by encouraging or compelling people of other ethnic groups to adopt the Hungarian language and culture, and to develop a Hungarian identity.

The term generally applies to the policies that were enforced^{[citation needed]} in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary in the 19th century and early 20th century, especially after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, and in particular after the rise in 1871 of the Count Menyhért Lónyay as head of the Hungarian government.^[1] The idea owes its existence to the Enlightenment due to which the 19th century saw the emergence of nation-states in many places in Europe (France, Italy, Germany). In its course large areas were culturally and linguistically homogenized (or at least attempts were made to make them so). The term is also used for similar yet more far-reaching policies, which were applied by the Hungarian authorities in Northern Transylvania and Bačka during World War II, which in some cases led to egregious atrocities.^{[citation needed]}

When referring to personal and geographic names, Magyarization stands for the replacement of an originally non-Hungarian name with a Hungarian one. For instance, the Romanian name "Ion Negru" would become "János Fekete", or the Slavic name "Novo Selo" would become "Újfalu"^{[citation needed]}.

As is often the case with policies intended to forge or bolster national identity in a state, Magyarization was perceived by other ethnic groups such as the Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, etc., as aggression or active discrimination, especially where they formed the majority of the population over large areas (for instance, Romanians were a majority in Transylvania.^{[citation needed]}

Magyarization can also refer to an identity shift, which would compel someone to identify with the Hungarian ethnicity, while having no Hungarian ancestors. For instance, Sándor Petőfi was a Hungarian of mixed Serb-Slovak descent.^[2] From the Hungarian point of view, historically notable personalities that came from Magyarized families were Hungarian.

The term Magyarization is usually used in regards to the national policies implemented by the government of the Kingdom of Hungary, which was part of the Habsburg Empire. The onset of this process dates to the late 18th century ^[3] and was intensified after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which increased the power of the Hungarian government within the newly formed Austria-Hungary. ^[4]

The Kingdom of Hungary (also called Transleithania since 1867 ^{[citation needed]}) was a multi-ethnic country inhabited by Magyars, Croats, Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Slovenians, Rusyns, Jews, Roma and other ethnicities. According to the 1910 census, Hungarians represented the largest ethnic group with 48% of the total population. If Croatia-Slavonia is excluded, the percentage grows to 54%, but even this figure is contested by some historians, for the census did not count "ethnicity", but native language (as well as "the most often spoken language", which led to manipulations with census results^[5]) and the religion. For instance, large numbers of Jews (who sought integration) declared Hungarian as their native language and were, accordingly, counted as Hungarians (The percent of Jews in 1910 census was 5%, thus without Jews, the percent of Hungarians would drop from 54% to 49%). We have to point out also that mainly because of large numbers of secular and in the world unique Neolog Jews ^[6] some of them had little desire to be declared a national minority like in other cultures. Large minorities were concentrated in various regions of the kingdom, where they formed significant majorities. In Transylvania proper (1876s borders), the 1910 census finds 55.08% Romanian-speakers, 34.2% Hungarian-speakers, and 8.71% German-speakers. In the north of the Kingdom, Slovaks and Ruthenians formed an ethnic majority also, in the southern regions the majority were South Slavic Croats, Serbs and Slovenians and in the western regions the majority were Germans.

The process of Magyarization did not succeed in imposing the Hungarian language as the most used language in all territories in the Kingdom of Hungary. In fact the profoundly multinational character of historic Transylvania was reflected in the fact that during the fifty years of the dual monarchy, the spread of Hungarian as the second language remained limited. In 1880, 5.7 percent of the non-Hungarian population, or 109,190 people, claimed to have a knowledge of the Hungarian language; the proportion rose to 11 percent (183,508) in 1900, and to 15.2 percent (266,863) in 1910. These figures reveal the reality of a bygone era, one in which millions of people could conduct their lives without speaking the state's official language.^[7] The policies of Magyarization aimed to make the fluency in Hungarian language a requirement for access to basic government services such as local administration, education, and justice.

The first Hungarian government after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the 1867–1871 liberal regime led by Count Gyula Andrássy and sustained by Ferenc Deák and his followers, passed the 1868 Nationality Act, that declared "all citizens of Hungary form, politically, one nation, the indivisible unitary Hungarian nation (nemzet), of which every citizen of the country, whatever his personal nationality (nemzetiség), is a member equal in rights." The Education Act, passed the same year, shared this view as the Magyars simply being primus inter pares ("first among equals"). At this time ethnic minorities "de jure" had a great deal of cultural and linguistic autonomy, including in education, religion, and local government.^[8]

However, after education minister Baron József Eötvös died in 1871, and in Andrassy became imperial foreign minister, Deak withdrew from active politics and Menyhért Lónyay became the Hungarian prime minister. He became steadily more allied with the Magyar gentry, and the notion of a Hungarian political nation increasingly became one of a Magyar nation. "[A]ny political or social movement which challenged the hegemonic position of the Magyar ruling classes was liable to be repressed or charged with 'treason'…, 'libel' or 'incitement of national hatred'. This was to be the fate of various Slovak, South Slav [e.g. Serb], Romanian and Ruthene cultural societies and nationalist parties from 1876 onward…"^[9] All of this only intensified after 1875, with the rise of Kálmán Tisza.^[10]

The political leaders of non-Hungarian ethnic groups claimed that the Kingdom of Hungary is a country of several nations, not only of Hungarians, and asked for recognition of their collective rights^{[citation needed]}.

For a long time, number of non-Hungarians that lived in the Kingdom of Hungary was much larger than a number of ethnic Hungarians. According to the 1787 data, the population of the Kingdom of Hungary numbered 2,322,000 Hungarians (29%) and 5,681,000 non-Hungarians (71%). In 1809, the population numbered 3,000,000 Hungarians (30%) and 7,000,000 non-Hungarians (70%). As an increasingly intense Magyarization policy was implemented after 1867,^[11] the ethnic relations changed in favour of Hungarians: according to the 1900 census, number of Hungarian language speakers in the Kingdom was 8,500,000 (51%), while number of speakers of other languages was 8,100,000 (49%). In 1910 census, number of Hungarian speakers was 9,944,628 (54.4%), while number of speakers of other languages was 8,319,905 (45.6%).^{[citation needed]}

Although in Slovak, Romanian and Serbian history writing administrative and often repressive Magyarization is usually singled out as the main factor accountable for the dramatic change in the ethnic composition of the Kingdom of Hungary in the 19th century, it should be noted that spontaneous assimilation was an important factor in some areas yet not prevailing in general. In this regard, it must be pointed out that large territories of central and southern Kingdom of Hungary lost their previous, predominantly Magyar population during the numerous wars fought by the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in the 16th and 17th centuries (also, it should be noted that those lands were previously inhabited by Slavs (and possibly by some remnants of Turkic Avars) before Finno-Ugric Hungarians arrived in the end of the 9th century. These empty lands were repopulated, by administrative measures adopted by the Vienna Court especially during the 18th century, by Hungarians and Slovaks from the northern part of the Kingdom that avoided the devastation (see also Royal Hungary), Swabians, Serbs (Serbs were majority in most southern parts of the Pannonian Plain during Ottoman rule, i.e. before those Habsburg administrative measures), Croats and Romanians. The result of this migration was that on a large swath of land, roughly between Kecskemét and the southern border areas, various ethnic groups lived side by side (this ethnic heterogeneity is preserved until today in certain parts of Vojvodina, Bačka and Banat). After 1867, Hungarian became the lingua franca on this territory in the interaction between ethnic communities, and individuals who were born in mixed marriages between two non-Magyars often grew a full-fledged allegiance to the Hungarian nation. The best-known example is Sándor Petőfi, Hungarian national poet born from a Serbian-Slovak marriage which contradicts a bit the right wing nature of Magyarization. A non-German could have never been a a national poet in Nazi Germany. Of course Since Latin was the official language until 1842 and the country was directly governed from Vienna (which excluded any large-scale governmental assimilation policy from the Hungarian side before the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the factor of spontaneous assimilation should be given due weight in any analysis relating to the demographic tendencies of the Kingdom of Hungary in the early 19th century, which however doesn't apply to the second part of the 19th century, when self-determination movements of minorities were repressed more vigorously.

Although the policy of Magyarization was mainly pursued in the form of discrimination (see the sections below), the measures were backed by the state police and secret police^{[citation needed]} and the government sometimes resorted to open violence. For example, many Slovak intellectuals and activists (such as Janko Kráľ) were imprisoned or even sentenced to death during the revolution in 1848.^[12] One of the incidents that shocked the European public opinion^[13] was the Černová tragedy when 15 people were killed in 1907.^[13] The case being a proof for the violence of Magyarization is disputed. Partly because the officer who ordered the shooting and all the shooters were ethnic Slovak. Partly because of the controversial figure of Andrej Hlinka.^[14] On the 17th October, 2007, before the centennial of the event Slovak civil activists were demonstrating^[15] against a law praising the merits of Andrej Hlinka. On their banners the sign "Hitler, Hlinka the same line" could be read.

Schools funded by churches and communes had the right to provide education in minority languages. These church-funded schools, however, were mostly founded before 1867, that is, in different socio-political circumstances. Clause 38 of the 1868 law about nationalities of the Kingdom of Hungary, determined that church-funded schools teaching in minority languages could be closed and replaced with commune-funded schools sponsored by the government.^{[citation needed]} In practice, the majority of students in commune-funded schools who were native speakers of minority languages were instructed exclusively in Hungarian. Moreover, the number of minority-language schools was steadily decreasing: in the period between 1880 and 1913, when the number of Hungarian-only schools almost doubled, the number of minority language-schools almost halved.^[17] Countless personal names were Magyarized in a short period of time, often forcibly or unwillingly.^{[citation needed]} Nonetheless, Transylvanian Romanians had more Romanian-language schools under Hungarian rule than there were in the Romanian Kingdom itself. Thus, for example, in 1880, in Hungary there were 2,756 schools teaching exclusively in the Romanian language, while in the Kingdom of Romania there were only 2,505.^[18]

The effect of Magyarization on the education system in Hungary was very significant, as can be seen from the official statistics submitted by the Hungarian government to the Paris Peace Conference:

Source:^[19]

The central part of the Kingdom of Hungary was colonized with settlers belonging to different nationalities in the 18th century. Colonization was implemented in the Dunántúl^{[citation needed]} and Alföld regions of present-day Hungary as well as in the Vojvodina region of present-day Serbia. That is considered an example of Magyarization by some Serb sources^{[citation needed]} in spite of the multhiethnic nature of colonization efforts at the same time.

In the beginning of the 18th century after the Turkish wars the devastated southern regions were mostly populated by South Slavic Serbs, Bunjevci and Šokci, although the population density in the area was low. During the next two centuries, the region was colonized by numerous Germans, as well as members of various other ethnic groups (Slovaks, Rusyns, etc) and in the same time Hungarians were also settling in. The Habsburg government especially favoured the settlements of Germans as part of the Germanization policy.^{[citation needed]}

In the 18th century, Count Antal Grassalkovich (who had Croatian ethnic background) introduced a colonization plan which intended to bring serfs to the sparsely populated Bačka.^[20] The plan predicted that Slovak, and Rusyn colonists along with Hungarians should be settled along the rivers Danube and Tisza. Serb historians^{[citation needed]} consider this plan to be an early Magyarization policy assuming that its goal was to provide that ethnic Serb population remain in majority only in central part of Bačka as well as that this Serb population found itself physically separated from other Serbs in Syrmia and Banat. This plan was rejected by the Austrian authorities,^[21] but was partially implemented by Grassalkovich who settled Hungarians in parts of Bačka, including Kula (in 1749), Topola (in 1740), Miletić (in 1752), etc.^[22] This plan is also mentioned in other non-Serb sources, such is Šviker Johan.^[23] Count Grassalkovich also settled many Slovak and German colonists on his other estates in present-day Hungary.

Serbian historians^{[citation needed]} consider that Count Grassalkovich settled Slovaks and Rusyns among Hungarians with the goal to increase number of Hungarians. Separated from their main ethnic territory in Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia, these two groups would be easily assimilated by the Hungarians. It is evident that most of the Slovaks of Roman Catholic faith that were settled in Vojvodina were later assimilated into the Hungarians, while those that were Protestants retained their Slovak ethnicity.

The settling in of Hungarians into the region continued until the end of the First World War. The statistics for 1880-1900 period show that the ordinary population growth in the Kingdom of Hungary for this period was +10.3%. However, the comparison between population growth of Serbs and Hungarians in the cities of Vojvodina show that Serb population growth was -19.5%, while Hungarian population growth was +105.2%. The last number, however, indicate both, colonization and Magyarization of non-Hungarians from the area.

The census system of the post-1867 Kingdom of Hungary was unfavourable to nationalities. According to the 1874 election law, which remained unchanged until 1918, only the upper 5.9% of whole population had voting rights. That high census effectively excluded almost the whole peasantry and the working class from the political life. The percentage of low-income people was somewhat higher among the nationalities than among the Magyars, except the Germans who were generally richer.

In 1900, nearly 33% of the deputies were elected by less than 100 and close upon 66% of the deputies were elected by less than 1000 votes.^[24] Transylvania had an even worse representation, the more Romanian a county was, the fewer voters did it possess. Out of the Transylvanian deputies sent to Budapest, 35 represented the 4 mostly Hungarian counties and the chief towns (together forming 20% of the population), whereas only 30 deputies represented another 72% of the population, which was predominantly Romanian. In other words, among Romanians there was an average of one deputy to every 60,000 inhabitants, while among the Hungarians one deputy to 4-5,000.^[25][26]

In 1913, even the electorate that elected only one-third of the deputies had a non proportional ethnic composition.^[24] The Magyars who gave the 54.5% of the whole population (in Hungary proper) had 60.2% majority in the electorate. Ethnic Germans participated with 10.4% in population and 13.0% in the electorate. The participation of other ethnic groups was as follows: Slovaks (10.7% in population, 10.4% in the electorate), Romanians (16.1% in population, 9.9% in the electorate), Rusyns (2.5% in population, 1.7% in the electorate), Croats (1.1% in population, 1.0% in the electorate), Serbs (2.2% in population, 1.4% in the electorate), and others (2.2% in population, 1.4% in the electorate).

Officially, Hungarian electoral laws haven't contained any legal discrimination based on nationality or language. The high census wasn't uncommon in other European countries in the 1860s but later the countries of Western-Europe gradually lowered and at last abolished their censi. That never happened in the Kingdom of Hungary, although electoral reform was one of the main topic of political debates in the last decades before World War I.

The Magyarization policy under the governing of Dezső Bánffy between 1895 and 1899 also included forced^{[citation needed]} Magyarization of personal and geographical names. The law about registry books prescribed that all names in these books should be in Hungarian. The native names of non-Hungarians were, thus, replaced with Hungarian ones, for example Serbian name Stevan was replaced with Istvan or Jelena with Ilona. The policy included not only Magyarization of personal names, but of surnames as well.

Hungarian authorities put constant pressure upon all non-Hungarians to Magyarize their names and the ease with which this could be done gave rise to the nickname of Crown Magyars (the price of the registration being one krone).^[25] In 1881 the "Society for Name Magyarization" (Központi Névmagyarositó Társaság) was founded in 1881 in Budapest. The aim of this private society was to provide advice and guidelines for those who wanted to Magyarize their surnames. Telkes Simon became the chairman of the society, who professed that “one can achieve being accepted as a true son of the nation by adopting a national name”. The society began an advertising campaign in the newspapers and sent out circular letters. They also made a proposal to lower the fees of the name changing. The proposal was accepted by the Parliament and the fee was lowered from 5 Forints to 50 Krajcárs. After this the name changings peaked in 1881 and 1882 (with 1261 and 1065 registered name changes), and continued in the following years on the average of 750-850 per year.^[27] During the Bánffy-administration there was another boost with the highest 6700 application forms in 1897, mostly due to the pressure from authorities and employers of the government sector. Statistics show that only between 1881 and 1905 42,437 surnames were Magyarized.^[25] Voluntary Magyarization of German or Slavic-sounding surnames remained a typical phenomenon in Hungary during the course of the whole 20th century.

Together with Magyarization of personal names and surnames, the exclusive use of the Hungarian names of geographical places, instead of multilingual usage, was also common. For the places that were not known under Hungarian names in the past, new Hungarian names were invented and used in administration instead of the former original non-Hungarian names. Examples of places where original non-Hungarian names were replaced with newly invented Hungarian names: Szvidnik - Felsővízköz (in Slovak Svidník, now Slovakia), Najdás - Néranádas (in Romanian Naidǎş, now Romania), Sztarcsova - Tárcsó (in Serbian Starčevo, now Serbia), Lyutta - Havasköz (in Ruthenian Lyuta, now Ukraine), Bruck - Királyhida (now Bruck an der Leitha, Austria)^{[citation needed]}.

According to Hungarian statistics^[28] and considering the huge number of assimilated persons between 1700-1944 (~3 million) only 340,000-350,000 names were magyarised between 1815-1944; this happened mainly inside the Hungarian-speaking area. (One Jewish name out of 17 was Magyarised, in comparation with other nationalities: one out of 139 (Catholic) -427 (Evangelical) for Germans and 170 (Catholic) -330 (Evangelical) for Slovaks.

Part of the Magyarization was a result of internal migration of segments of the ethnically non-Hungarian population to the Kingdom of Hungary's central predominantly Hungarian counties and to Budapest where they assimilated. The ratio of ethnically non-Hungarian population in the Kingdomn was also dropping due to their overrepresentation among the migrants to foreign countries, mainly to the United States.^[29] Hungarians, the largest ethnic group in the Kingdom representing 45.5% of the population in 1900, accounted for only 26.2% of the emigrants, while non-Hungarians (54.5%) accounted for 72% from 1901 to 1913.^[30] The areas with the highest emigration were the northern mostly Slovak counties of Šariš, Spiš, and Zemplín, and Uzh County with a substantial Rusyn population. In the next tier were some of the southern counties including Bács-Bodrog, Torontál, Temes, and Krassó-Szörény largely inhabited by Serbs, Romanians, and Germans, as well as the northern mostly Slovak counties of Orava, Gemer, and the central mostly Hungarian county of Veszprém. The reasons for emigration were mostly economic.^[31] Additionally, some may have wanted to avoid Magyarization or the draft, but direct evidence of other than economic motivation among the emigrants themselves is limited.^[32] The Kingdom's administration welcomed the development as yet another instrument of increasing the ratio of ethnic Hungarians at home.^[33]

The state-sponsored shipowner society "Kunard" was founded with a purpose to "help" to as many non-Hungarians as possible to emigrate from the Kingdom.^{[citation needed]} The society provided emigrants with emigrant passports and helped them to emigrate from the country. The "Kunard" society, however, did not gave these passports to the ethnic Hungarians.^[34]

Until 1914, 25% of the emigrants returned (this process was stopped by World War I).^{[citation needed]} The majority of the emigrants came from the most indigent social groups, especially from the agrarian sector. Almost 530,000 people left the country between 1905 and 1907, which shows a direct connection^{[citation needed]} between the U.S. trade fluctuation^{[citation needed]} and Hungary's developing stages^{[citation needed]} (the living standard of the peasantry, decline of agrarian movements, and even the Phylloxera plague).

In the nineteenth century, the Neolog Jews were located mainly in the cities and larger towns. They arose in the environment of the latter period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire generally good period for upwardly mobile Jews, especially those of modernizing inclinations. In the Hungarian portion of the Empire, most Jews (nearly all Neologs and even most of the Orthodox) adopted the Hungarian language as their primary language and viewed themselves as "Magyars of the Jewish persuasion".^[35]
The Jewish population of the Kingdom of Hungary may have been the only minority to actively embrace Magyarization, because it saw it as an opportunity for assimilation without conceding their religion. Stephen Roth writes, "Hungarian Jews were opposed to Zionism because they hoped that somehow they could achieve equality with other Hungarian citizens, not just in law but in fact, and that they could be integrated into the country as Hungarian Israelites. The word 'Israelite' (Template:Lang-hu) denoted only religious affiliation and was free from the ethnic or national connotations usually attached to the term 'Jew'. Hungarian Jews attained remarkable achievements in business, culture and less frequently even in politics. But even the most successful Jews were not fully accepted by the majority of the Magyars as one of their kind — as the events following the German Nazi invasion of the country in World War II so tragically demonstrated." ^[36]
In 2006 the Company for Hungarian Jewish Minority could not collect 1000 signatures for a petiton to declare Hungarian Jews a minority^[37] even though there are at least 100000 Jews in the country. The official Hungarian Jewish religious organization, Mazsihisz advised not to vote for the new status because they think that Jews identify themselves as a religious group, not as a 'national minority'. There was no real control throughout the process and non-Jewish people could also sign the petition^[38] .

As a result of the Magyarization policy in the Kingdom of Hungary, the Slovaks were a culturally, politically, etc. decimated nation. Although the share of Slovaks within the electorate (10,4%) largely reflected their weight in the total population of Hungary proper (10,7%) Slovaks had extremely marginal representation in the parliament (0 or 1 deputy out of 420 MPs). Although at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 there were more than one thousand Slovak elementary schools, their number was gradually reduced to 322 by 1918. Slovaks had no institutions, offices, judges, they were often prevented from voting on ethnic grounds, students were expelled from schools just for speaking Slovak in the street or for owning Slovak books, it was impossible to buy a train ticket in Slovak in Slovak speaking regions.^{[39][40][41][42]}

• 1844 - Hungarian is gradually introduced for all civil records (kept at local parishes until 1895). German became an official language again after the 1848 revolution, but the laws reverted in 1881 yet again. From 1836 to 1881, 14,000 families had their name Magyarized in the area of Banat alone.
• 1898 - Simon Telkes publishes the book "How to Magyarize family names".
• 1897 - The Bánffy law of the villages is ratified. According to this law, all officially used village names in the Hungarian Kingdom had to be in Hungarian language.
• 1907 - The Apponyi educational law made Hungarian a compulsory subject in all schools in the Kingdom of Hungary. This also extended to confessional and communal schools, which had the right to provide instruction in a minority language as well. "All pupils regardless of their native language must be able to express their thoughts in Hungarian both in spoken and in written form at the end of fourth grade [~ at the age of 10 or 11]"^[17]

• Treaty of Trianon
• Transylvanian Memorandum
• Slovakization
• Romanianization
• Serbianisation
• Neolog

1. Dr. Dimitrije Kirilović, Pomađarivanje u bivšoj Ugarskoj, Novi Sad - Srbinje, 2006 (reprint). Originally printed in Novi Sad in 1935.
2. Dr. Dimitrije Kirilović, Asimilacioni uspesi Mađara u Bačkoj, Banatu i Baranji, Novi Sad - Srbinje, 2006 (reprint). Originally printed in Novi Sad in 1937 as Asimilacioni uspesi Mađara u Bačkoj, Banatu i Baranji - Prilog pitanju demađarizacije Vojvodine.
3. Lazar Stipić, Istina o Mađarima, Novi Sad - Srbinje, 2004 (reprint). Originally printed in Subotica in 1929 as Istina o Madžarima.
4. Dr. Fedor Nikić, Mađarski imperijalizam, Novi Sad - Srbinje, 2004 (reprint). Originally printed in Novi Sad in 1929.
5. Borislav Jankulov, Pregled kolonizacije Vojvodine u XVIII i XIX veku, Novi Sad - Pančevo, 2003.
6. Dimitrije Boarov, Politička istorija Vojvodine, Novi Sad, 2001.
7. Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, Routledge, 1998. ISBN 0-415-16111-8 hardback, ISBN 0-415-16112-6 paper.

• Scotus Viator (pseudonym), Racial Problems in Hungary, London: Archibald and Constable (1908), reproduced in its entirety on line. See especially Magyarization of schools (as of 1906)
• Magyarization in Banat