Domains of Hungarian language use in Belgrade

Abstract: This paper attempts at opening a dialogue on multilingualism in the city of Belgrade today. Belgrade, like other Southeast European cities, has developed much differently over the past decades than other European capitals, e.g. during the 1990s, the city and its population ex-perienced the break-up of Yugoslavia, the authoritarian and nationalistic regime, sanctions, NATO bombing, both large-scale out-migration and in-migration. All these changes were not stimulating for the city’s multilingualism. Belgrade, however, has more than 10 percent of population whose native language is not Serbian. This paper aims to explore the use of Hun-garian in the city. The analysis is based upon questionnaires that were disseminated among Hungarian speaking population in Belgrade. The results we are going to present are only pre-liminary, since the collected corpus is limited in terms of small numbers of respondents and insufficiently diverse sample, e.g. the majority of respondents were students of Hungarian. However, we would like to offer an overview of the Hungarian speaking population in Bel-grade today and indicate possible trends and major domains of Hungarian language use. Added to that, we will take a critical stance on monolingualising tendencies of the state and its institutions as well as on the policy of the compartmentalisation of languages.