Name Magyarization and Hungarianness: The Reception of Magyarized Names in the Dualist Period (1867-1919)

This paper aims at analyzing some aspects of the reception of Magyarized family names in the dualist period, aspects which might even seem marginal but could emphasize the ambiguities of contemporary expectations, especially assumptions about name Magyarization as a “patriotic imperative” and the related political, cultural, and ideological field that contained several competing and often self-contradictory claims vis-à-vis the Magyarizers. Name changes, and the phenomenon of Magyarizing surnames can be described from a socio-historical perspective as “an act performed in a web of relations comprised of three different agents.” Each act of name Magyarization implies an interaction between two actors, the petitioner and an administrative unit. However, the social historian may take into account a third actor a field of power that influences individual choices and that is equivalent to the “historically given, concrete social, linguistic-cultural, political and ideological environment.”