The eleven volumes of The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania constitute a fundamental source of Hungarian dialectology. Together with The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects, they jointly cover the Eastern dialect region of Hungarian, and provide a detailed picture of the state of the local varieties of the language in the mid-twentieth century, including their phonology, morphology, lexicon, and word semantics. The underlying fieldwork and the compilation of the manuscript are due to László Murádin, a researcher from Kolozsvár (Cluj). The volumes were published with the help of a series of grants awarded to The Society of Hungarian Linguistics, as a project of the team of Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, edited by Dezső Juhász, between 1995 and 2010. The present paper gives an overview of the various phases of the preparation and publication of the atlas, its major scholarly challenges, as well as the reception of the series of volumes. It gives copious examples of books and papers that were written in the wake of the atlas. A separate section is devoted to the possibilities of taking advantage of recent results of computer-assisted dialectology, making it possible to conduct further integrated research based on the present atlas and other dialect atlases of Hungarian.

Keywords: The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania, publication history, reception, linguistic geography, linguistic-geographical databases, merging of atlases, multifarious uses of linguistic atlases.

Juhász Dezső
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Dialectologists seldom undertake the task of delving into the most recent results of semantics and of applying the newest methods in their investigations of word geography; semanticians, on the other hand, usually base their theories on standard languages. The geographic distribution of the behaviour of adjectives is an area of which particularly little is known. However, diversity in the articulation of a given semantic field is not only observable when different standard languages are compared: such diversity can also be seen in comparing various dialects of the same language. The rich material comprised in The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania has made it possible to study various subsystems and the behaviour of a given word across those subsystems. In the present paper the conceptual area of secondary human properties and, in particular, the data of the map of kákabelű ‘poor trencherman, thin (person) etc.’ (Map 1281) are thoroughly analysed.

Keywords: dialectology, linguistic geography, Hungarian dialects in Romania, word semantics, subsystems.

Terbe Erika
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

A quantitative study in linguistic geography based on informatised maps of The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania

In a series of interrelated computational dialectology projects of the past ten years, computerised (appropriately digitised and fit for quantitative analysis) versions of The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects and several regional atlases have been produced. This paper investigates the applicability of dialectometric analyses based on computerised volumes of The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania for the study of the origins of dialect islands and those of Hungarian settlements in Moldova. The results show that dialectometry as an objective research method may be appropriate for the confirmation and refinement of results of earlier analyses following other methods; that is, it can be put to good use in exploring centuries-old linguistic relations.

Keywords: dialectometry, quantitative linguistic geography, dialect enclaves, linguistic similarity, The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania.

Vargha Fruzsina Sára
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

On issues of the merger of entries in a virtual language atlas of Hungarian dialects spoken in Romania

This paper discusses the merger of entries of language atlases of Hungarian-speaking territories of Romania: A Linguistic Atlas of Szilágyság; two printed volumes of Atlas of Moldavian Csángó Dialects, and the third volume published in CD format only, A Dialect Atlas of Hétfalu; the Székely Linguistic Geography Dictionary; as well as The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania covering the whole Hungarian linguistic area in Romania and The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects that includes collection sites from Romania, too. It lists twenty-four typical lexicographic problems occurring during the process of merging entries, illustrating each problem by at least one but possibly two or three examples. The paper suggests that creating a table of merged entries required considerable circumspection; the table then served as a point of departure for listing the headwords of other regional linguistic atlases of the Hungarian-speaking area in an aggregate list of headwords, the work of a different researcher.

Hegedűs Andrea
BGSZC Fáy András Közlekedésgépészeti, Műszaki Szakközépiskolája

The paper discusses eighteen of the twenty-two Hungarian language atlases published between 1948 and 2011: The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects based on a network of collection sites covering the whole Hungarian-speaking area, as well as five Transylvanian and eleven Transdanubian atlases as well as one from Felvidék (Slovakia). First, atlases of the Eastern and Western regions are compared according to their time of collection and publication, showing that in Transylvania, they were produced relatively simultaneously while in Transdanubia they were published during a rather long period of time. The coverage and overlap features of the two regions can be studied via perusing the collection sites of the large versus regional atlases; percentages of coincidence show that collection work for regional atlases complementing the national atlas was conducted more watchfully and in a better-planned manner in the Eastern region. With respect to the collection of linguistic data, the selection of fieldworkers and a uniform methodology of collection are of prime importance. It is difficult to find detailed data concerning the latter issue, but it seems to be confirmed that the two large atlases and the Transylvanian regional ones were made with a uniform methodology. Coincidences across the headwords of the atlases provide a variety of possibilities for comparison and analysis. In this paper, coincidence percentages of The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania and the atlases of the Western region are compared. Among other conclusions, it is shown that The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania has only ten headwords that are not included in any of the western atlases.

Keywords: linguistic geography, language atlas, merging of atlases, aggregate headword list, The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects in Romania.

Szabó Panna
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem