Our Colleagues at the 23rd Hungarian Sociolinguistic Conference in Cluj

The 23rd Hungarian Sociolinguistic Conference took place in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) on 3–5 September 2025. For decades, this event has represented the most prestigious forum for sociolinguists in the Carpathian Basin. This year’s itinerant conference was hosted and primarily organized by the Babeș–Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters, Department of Hungarian and General Linguistics. Co-organizers included the Attila Szabó T. Linguistic Institute and the Linguistics Section of the Cluj Academic Committee.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Linguicism – Its Manifestations, Mechanisms, and the Tasks of Linguistics.” Linguicism – discrimination based on language – continues to permeate discourses and social interactions concerning languages and language varieties. Over the course of three days, the program featured six parallel sections with a total of 41 papers, as well as three plenary lectures, a world café session, a book launch, and a workshop.

Staff members and a doctoral student from the Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Literary Science, Faculty of Central European Studies, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra contributed four papers to the conference program. Károly Presinszky presented on “positive linguicism” in the online representation of Hungarian dialects in Slovakia; Ildikó Vančo and István Kozmács analysed primary school pupils’ attitudes toward the palóc (Hungarian) dialect; Ján Bauko examined the transformation of minority name policy in Slovakia in the light of linguicism; and Anna Oros Bugár and Ildikó Vančo investigated the attitudes of secondary school students from both minority and majority backgrounds towards the Hungarian language variety used in Slovakia.

The event was not merely an academic symposium – the friendly atmosphere reflected the fact that this was an international gathering of colleagues who have been working and reflecting together for many years, even decades. Thanks to careful organization, the social programs following the academic sessions offered excellent opportunities to deepen long-standing professional contacts and to lay the foundations for new collaborations.

Author: Anna Bugár Oros