According to the 2001 report by the Committee of Experts on the implementation of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, Hungary “has undertaken an ambitious effort in drafting a form of a model legislation on the protection of minorities”.[1]
Since the political changes in 1990, Hungary has established internal legal and institutional frameworks for the protection of minorities, such as the Act on self-governments. This Act gives all recognised national and ethnic minorities the right to establish minorityself-governments on a local and national level. At this very moment over athousand local and thirteen national self-governments exist. The main tasks and responsibilities of these self-governments lie in guaranteeing autonomy in education and culture. In order to achieve this the elected local governments have the right to establish and run cultural and educational institutions. The main task of minority representatives on a national level is professional monitoring of minority education. These national representatives are elected by the local self-governments.[2]
From a Western-European point of view, the Hungarianlanguage policy is considered to be a favourable exception to the common Eastern-European minority language policy. Especially because Hungary has a so-called “Office for National and Ethnic Minorities”, an institution that operates independantly, doing its job under the authority of the Hungarian government. The managing director of the office is appointed by the prime minister of Hungary and the office is supervised bythe Hungarian department of justice. Moreover the Hungarian government set up a “Public Foundation for Minorities” and a Public Foundation for Hungarian Roma’s. However, practical implementations of the legal standards are not always optimal, according to Pan (2002). Discrimination of the Roma’s is still common practice in daily life in Hungary and, taking the other language minorities in Hungary into consideration, a lot of work is left to be carried out in the fields of media, education and participation in daily life in general.[3]
 
Hungary signed (1992), ratified (1995) and implemented (1998) the European Charter for Regional and Minority languages. Hungary ratified the Charter in the field of education for the following languages:Croatian, German, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian and Slovenian. It is striking that Hungary always signed only the last section of paragraph 1, article 8 (education) of the Charter, which seems to state that the government is expected to undertake only minimal action when it comes to minority education. According to the Charter Hungarian government should because of that, tolerate, stimulate and encourage education in minority languages. The Charter does not however, impose a law on Hungary to create facilities for education in the active manner that it does. Also, it does not force Hungary to offer education for all minority languages, but only for those pupils whose families requesteducation in their own language (other than the majority language), and only if there are enough of them.[4]
Hungary also signed (1995), ratified (1995) and implemented (1998) the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.
Hungary made agreements with neighbouring countries concerning its minority languages. Because of that some minority language communities in Hungary can make use of learning materials of its hinterland, where teachers also can be educated. Wit this policy, Hungary hopes that its neighbouring countries will treat their Hungarian minorities in a proper way as well (e.g. the Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc.).
According to Christoph Pan (2002) there are three types of “minority language schools” in Hungary: schools where all students are taught in the minority language; bilingual schools where every subject is taught in both languages (Hungarian – ML) and bilingual schools where one half of the curriculum is taught in Hungarian and the other half is taught in the minority language.[5]
 
Hungary has nursery-schools in which national minority languages such as German, Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Serbian and Slovenian are used either as the only instructive language, or as an instructive language next to Hungarian (bilingual nursery-schools). There are, especially in comparison to the other minority language nursery-schools, a lot of German language or bilingual German-Hungarian nursery schools: 263 out of the 401 minority language nursery-schools are German or German-Hungarian. In the 1999/2000 school-year Hungary counted a total of 19.419 pupils in minority language nursery-schools, 14.141 of which were in German or German-Hungarian nursery-schools.
In Hungary there are minority language primary schools for the German, Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian and Greek language communities. Again, the majority of schools uses German as (one of) the language(s) of instruction: out of the 54,876 pupils studying at a minority language school, 46,254  are doing so at a school where the German language is used as a medium of instruction. The same goes for minority language education at secondary school level. Education in secondary schools is provided in Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Romany, Serbian, Slovenian and German. However, there are not that many minority language secondary schools: 23 altogether, which count 2,825 studens in total, of which 1,978 are in one of the thirteen German schools (For the exact numbers of minority language schools and pupils on these schools in Hungary on all three educational levels, see the tables 2, 3 and 4 below).
 
The Roma’s in Hungary speak Hungarian, Romany (the Oláh or the Beás variant) and (archaic) Romanian. The exact number of Roma’s is not known; estimates differ from 142.000 to 600.000. According to a report written under the authority of the European Parliament from 2001, 48.000 Roma’s speak Romany as their mother tongue. According to other sources 150.000 Roma’s in Hungary speak a variety of Romany as their first language.[6]
However, there are 189 pre-primary schools where half of the pupils belong to the Roma-community. In the 2001 report by the Committee of Experts on the implementation of the Charter in Hungary recommendations were made to organize bilingual education (Romany Hungarian) for Roma’s in Hungary, in order to improve the social integration of Roma’s in society and to preserve the language and cultural identity of the Roma communities. At the same time it would be a good weapon against the traditional discrimination of Roma’s.  Today, there is one secondary school in Hungary where Romany is the language of instruction for 118 pupils. There are no schools on pre-primary or primary level where Romany is the medium of instruction.
 
According to the data of the Ethnologue Report of Hungary (www.ethnologue.com; SIL International), languages like Macedonian, Osetin and Yiddish are also spoken in Hungary. However, there are no numbers mentioned for these languages. It may very well be that among the people who said that they where native speakers of Greek, there were in fact some who speak Macedonian as their mother tongue, but were born as Greek citizins. The numbers of (native) speakers of Osetin and Yiddish are probably very small. There is no education in these minority languages in Hungary.
 
Table 1

Minority groups in Hungary	Number of citizens who undertake to use native language		Change in the number of citizens who undertake to use native language in %	Number of citizens who undertake their nationality status		Change in the number of citizens who undertake their nationality status	Number of citizens who are associated with ethnic cultural values and traditions	Number of citizens who use their own languages in the family and among friends
	1990	2001		1990	2001		2001	2001
Bulgarian	1 370	1 299	-5,18	..	1 358		1 693	1 118
Roma	48 072	48 685	1,28	142 683	190 046	33,19	129 259	53 323
Greek	1 640	1 921	17,13	..	2 509		6 140	1 974
Croatian	17 577	14 345	-18,39	13 570	15 620	15,11	19 715	14 788
Polish	3 788	2 580	-31,89	..	2 962		3 983	2 659
German	37 511	33 792	-9,91	30 824	62 233	101,90	88 416	53 040
Armenian	37	294	694,59	..	620		836	300
Romanian	8 730	8 482	-2,84	10 740	7 995	-25,56	9 162	8 215
Serbian	2 953	3 388	14,73	2 905	3 816	31,36	5 279	4 186
Slovak	12 745	11 817	-7,28	10 459	17 693	69,17	26 631	18 057
Slovenian	2 627	3 187	21,32	1 930	3 040	57,51	3 442	3 119
Ruthenian	674	1 113		..	1 098		1 292	1 068
Ukrainian		4 885		..	5 070		4 779	4 519
Total:	137 724	135 788	-1,41	213 111	314 060	47,37	300 627	166 366

Number of children in minority nursery-schools (1999/2000 school-year)
	Number of nursery-schools	Number of children in minority language nursery-schools	Number of children in bilingual nursery-schools	Total
German	263	1,488	12,653	14,141
Slovakian	73	103	2,947	3,050
Croatian	37	253	1,135	1,388
Romanian	14	130	417	547
Serbian	9	87	94	181
Slovenian	5	0	112	112
Total	401	2,061	17,358	19,419

Number of pupils in minority primary schools (1999/2000 school-year)
	Number of schools	Number of pupils in minority language schools	Number of pupils in bilingual schools	Number of pupils in language instruction schools	Total
German	284	758	4,911	40,585	46,254
Slovakian	59	92	658	3,674	4,424
Croatian	34	319	0	2,207	2,526
Romanian	14	427	188	583	1,198
Slovenian	4	0	22	94	116
Serbian	11	164	0	111	275
Greek	2	0	0	83	83
Total	408	1,760	5,779	47,337	54,876

	Number of institutions		Number of students in secondary grammar-schools		Number of students in specialized secondary schools		Total
	minority language, bilingual	lang. instr.	minority language, bilingual	language instr.	minority language, bilingual	language instr.
German	4	9	1,007	692	122	157	1,978
Slovakian	2		105		13		118
Croatian	2		219				219
Romanian	1	2	129	128			257
Serbian	1		126				126
Slovenian		1		9			9
Roma		1		118			118
Total	10	13	1,586	947	135	157	2,825

Number of children and students in institutions of minority education between 2001-2003
	School-year	Number in nursery-schools	Number in prim. schools	Number in sec. gram. schools	Number in spec. sec. schools	Number in institutions of higher education
Croatian	2001/02	1,80	1,527	179	...	98
	2002/03	1,161	2,033	163	56	96
German	2001/02	13,423	39,692	2,685	601	167
	2002/03	13,333	41,026	2,302	643	163
Romanian	2001/02	495	824	177	...	107
	2002/03	425	1,047	193	...	94
Serbian	2001/02	370	476	110	...	68
	2002/03	236	274	106	...	59
Slovakian	2001/02	1,960	3,269	127	33	165
	2002/03	2,783	3,642	117	21	137
Slovenian	2001/02	312	251	12	...	4
	2002/03	74	94	12