A group of young activists from the Bilingual Southern Slovakia Movement have installed a Hungarian-language sign at a railway station at a Slovakian town which is the hub of the region’s ethnic Hungarians on Wednesday.
The station had been known officially only by its Slovak name Dunajská Streda despite the fact that close to 75 per cent of the town’s 22 000 inhabitants declared themselves as Hungarians at the 2011 census. According to the Slovak minority languages act, it would be obligatory to display bilingual signing at similar settlements, but the railway company claims that technical regulations concerning the issue are absent despite the clarificaton of the situation being its own competence.
The Bilingual Southern Slovakia Movement is confident that the situation will be solved despite Slovak authorities’ meaningless niggling over the previous years. The activists aim to set a good example and highlight the value of bilinguarity.
Close to 500 000 ethnic Hungarians live in the southern areas of Slovakia.