Research of the Folklore of Slavic National Minorities of Hungary at the Late 20th – Early 21st Century

The study of folk culture and folklore of national communities in Hungary is a long-standing tradition, and since the 1950s and 1970s it has been moving to new organizational and research levels, including the activities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Hungarian Ethnographic Society, the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest, local museums, archives, and universities. Today, there are 13 national minorities in the country, the most numerous of which are Gypsy, German, Romanian, followed by Slovak, Ukrainian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Polish, Ruthenian, and others. The relevance of the article is caused by a set of problems related to cohabitation, communication of various communities in the globalized world, their self-identification, preservation of their own language and culture, national traditions. The purpose and tasks of the study are to outline the main trends in the development of Slavic folkloristics studies in Hungary in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, namely among the national minorities; to examine the main stages of this process, the recording, publication, and research of Slavic folklore, the main topics and issues, the activities of individual scholars and institutions, etc. Hungarian scholars have continued to collect folklore and ethnography during the period under review. The collected material is partially published in the form of popular scientific and academic collections, manuals, textbooks, repertoire material, etc. Further research is being carried out based on this information, so that the folk culture of the country’s largest Slavic communities is widely covered. Most researchers’ attention is drawn to ceremonial folklore, mainly the folk calendar, and lyrical songs, ballads, as well as prose genres such as fairy tales, legends, and so on. The study is diverse, covering individual regions, localities, villages, or a group of genres, or individual genres, themes, plots, characters, etc. In this regard, such aspects of consideration as the role of folklore in national culture, problems of national identification, popularization, preservation of folk culture, historicism of oral poetry, folklore and folklorisation arise. Special yearbooks have been publishing systematically in the country since 1975. These are bilingual collections of research, both general and on individual nationalities, a number of international conferences have been held, and active cooperation with the countries of the main ethnic group continues.