English loan words are more omnipresent in present-day Hungarian than ever before. Whatever TV channel you switch on, whatever newspaper you read in Hungarian, you will inevitably come across an increasingly large number of terms and phrases rooted, in a variety of ways, in British/American English. This phenomenon is so obvious that not only have linguists dealt with it in the last decade, but journalists have also devoted many articles to examining its repercussions on Hungarian society and culture. No wonder, then, that articles regarding the role of English in Hungary and elsewhere, such as 'English the universal language of the net' or 'Why English is the actual lingua franca', are an everyday occurrence (Kontra, 1998).

This chapter deals with Hungarian (Magyar), for long the largest non-Indo-European language spoken in Europe, and therefore a traditional source of fascination for Western linguists. This said, a few words of caution about its current status seem necessary, to clarify the territorial limits of our investigation. Hungarian is spoken today by about 13 million native speakers, of which close to 10 million live in the Republic of Hungary. About two million speakers live in territories that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. The largest Hungarian-speaking minority, of about 1.4 million, is found in Romania, and smaller ethnic and linguistic communities live in Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria and Slovenia. While the linguistic developments in dominant Hungary penetrate in various forms into the linguistic satellite communities beyond its national border, there are certain linguistic differences between Hungary and other Hungarian-speaking communities, especially in regard to linguistic borrowing. For this reason, the present chapter focuses on the borrowing of English lexicon in Hungary alone.