The Word of the Week – A dissemination project of pluricentric Hungarian

Hungarian is apluricentriclanguage, which means that it is used inpublicadministration, education, culture, and other high-prestige linguistic domains in multiple countries. One of the main goals of the Termini Hungarian LanguageResearch Network is to document the distinctive lexical elements of the regional language varieties spoken by Hungarian minorities outside the borders of Hungary and to establish these mostly state-language loanwords as recognized elements of the Hungarian lexicon. The Termini Online Hungarian Dictionary and Database(TOHDD), available online since 2007, contains more than 5,570 lexical borrowings from the everyday speech of Hungarian minorities living in Austria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Promoting the content of the dictionary is a key task, as most people tend to have a negative attitude toward vocabulary elements that deviate from the standard variety of the Hungarian language. For this reason, adissemination project showcasing cross-border language use has been launched under the name The Word of the Week. In 2016, the editors of the TOHDD in Croatia first introduced itas acolumn in a local newspaper. Shortly afterward, TheWord of the Weekposts began to appearon the Termini Facebook page, expanding to all regions. Every week, a loanword relevant to thegiven timeperiod was shared via social media, allowing both Hungarians in Hungary and those living beyond the country’s borders to become familiar with the unique lexical elements of various regional language varieties.After a longpause, The Word of the Weekresumed in April 2024 on a weekly basis and has yielded numerous positive results within a year. The posts have reached tens of thousands of people, who have liked, shared, or commented on the images more than 4,000times, contributing to the greater acceptance of Hungarian language varieties spoken outside Hungary. The initiative has successfully ensured that discussions about different Hungarian language varieties are not confinedto sociolinguistic and contact linguistic studies published in scientificjournals but are also present in a widely accessibleand frequently used social media platform.