About Magyar Nyelvjárások [Hungarian Dialects]

Magyar Nyelvjárások [Hungarian Dialects] was established in 1951 by Founding Editor Géza Bárczi and may be regarded as successor to Magyar Népnyelv [Hungarian Vernacular] (1941–1949 with Bálint Csűry as its Founding Editor ). It is published annually in the first quarter of every year by the University of Debrecen Press as a Hungarian-language, peer-reviewed, open-access journal. When the journal began, its main focus (as also indicated by its name) was research on the Hungarian vernacular and Hungarian dialects. With time, newer and newer research areas appeared in the journal. Such a change was a natural development rooted in the continuous evolution of scholarly interest and the internal structure of linguistics itself. Moving beyond the thematic homogeneity characteristic of the first period, today’s Magyar Nyelvjárások provides a forum for publications by scholars working in numerous fields of linguistics: studies published here primarily come from the fields of dialectology, historical linguistics, historical toponomastics, lexicology, sociolinguistics, stylistics and discourse analysis but the journal is also open to publishing studies from other areas of specialization. Although today it is characterized much more by diversity, there is still a degree of uniformity in its contents as most papers published follow the investigative methods of empirical linguistics. In this way Magyar Nyelvjárások continues the tradition of the founders and represents their intentions in today’s scholarly environment.
Besides the essays and articles making up most of the contents of the issues of Magyar Nyelvjárások, the journal also regularly publishes reviews, criticism, dialectal data, as well as commemorations.
The proportion of linguistic data published has, however, decreased significantly since the first issue , while the nature of published essays has also changed. The former dialectal text publications have become less dominant (due to developments in audio recording technologies) and have been replaced mostly by data publications in the area of onomastics and lexicology. Also, in this section are published studies not only from dialectology but also from the area of onomastics and lexicology.

The Commemorations section publishes greetings, obituaries and reminiscences.
The journal issues usually range from 180 to 250 pages.
Magyar Nyelvjárások is published annually in the first quarter of the year on or before March 31.