MAGYARON: MORPHOLOGY, MEANING, AND MARGINALIZATION

The paper traces the word Magyaron from its first attestation in the 1830s to its re-appearance in twenty-first-century Ukrainian polemics, arguing that the label functions not as an ethnonymic slur but as a pistonym—a name that targets allegiance rather than ancestry. Drawing on Habsburg archival files, inter-war Czechoslovak personnel lists, Soviet-era silences, and post-1991 media, the study reconstructs four phases: (1) pamphlet satire under the Dual Monarchy, (2) bureaucratic category in the post-Trianon borderlands, (3) Cold-War eclipse, and (4) post-Soviet revival. Because Magyaron is morphologically indistinguishable from an ordinary Hungarian case form, it operates as a linguistic shibboleth—inaudible to most Hungarian speakers yet a potent accusation among their neighbours. This camouflage has allowed successive regimes, parties, and nationalist movements to brand individuals or communities as politically unreliable while avoiding overt ethnic invective. Situating the term within onomastic theory, the article shows how small, seemingly archaic lexemes continue to mediate sovereignty claims and minority–majority relations in Central Europe. Recognising Magyaron’s pistonymic logic is therefore essential to counter present-day “weaponised historicism” that confuses shifting loyalties with fixed ethnic treachery.