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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Hungarian Nation: From Hungary to Magyarország

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This chapter’s title is a linguistic pun that needs explanation. Magyarorszag means ‘Hungary’ in Magyar. But scholars writing in languages that used to be minority ones in the Hungarian section of Austria-Hungary are careful to distinguish between multiethnic historical Hungary and the ethnically Magyar nation-state that emerged after World War I. Obviously, this distinction originated due to the 19th-century insistence on the part of Magyar politicians that the Magyar language should be spoken by all the inhabitants of the multiethnic and multilingual Kingdom of Hungary. But one can find the first recorded instance of conscious distinguishing between Hungaris and Magyaris in the 1778 Latin-language letter of polymath Daniel Cornides (1732–1787) born in Upper Hungary and educated in Presburg (Csaky 1982: 80).