FORMS OF LANGUAGE CONTACT IN VOJVODINIAN HUNGARIAN FAMILY NAMES

Abstract

The great variety of Vojvodinian Hungarian family names is coming from the period of settling and migration in the 18-19th century, but this variety has become even more wide as there were more and more mixed marriages. Language contact phenomena in family names may be of phonetic origin, mainly caused by the different vocal substance of Serbian and Hungarian language as in Kürti > Kirti, Györe > Đere. Language contacts raise numerous questions about spelling, too: shifts between Latin and Cyrillic script, transcription of the Hungarian letters ny and gy, hybrid forms of names (e.g. Aničić Dália). In our research we are dealing with questions of family names which got adopted in Hungarian: e.g. German names as well as those of Slavic origin, the integration of names with suffixes -ics ~ -ity, common words originating from the same etymon becoming family names in the languages which are in contact. In the process of creation of the examined corpus of family names, a diachronic aspect of the use of names in the region was important, as well.