MODEL OF BILINGUAL PRESS IN THE HUNGARIAN CULTURE OF YUGOSLAVIA/VOJVODINA

Abstract

Defining feature of the early history of press in Vojvodina is multilingualism. In the centres of the region there was a great tradition of distributing and reading papers in Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian and German until 1945. Beginning with 1945 bilingual periodicals became characteristic in the history of Yugoslav press. Hungarian-Serbian bilingual official, municipal, school, specialised and home papers published during this period were linguistic, cultural and ideological representations of the multinational background, social self-government, and brotherhood and unity. The process of privatisation which slowly started in the 90s stimulated the foundation of periodicals. Next to the few local bilingual written media we can also find a few multilingual publications (local or specialised papers). The turn of the millennium, which favours multiculturalism, is only periodically and in a small percentage backed up with few bilingual or multilingual publications. The study aims at drawing the bilingual Yugoslav model of written media bearing in mind the eras of Yugoslav/Vojvodina press.