ABSTRACT
Many people with German as their native language live outside the territories in which German is an official language of state. This chapter aims to define these people as speakers of German as a minority language. Language communities with very small speaker numbers are often associated with minorities without a majority or official-language state. The most obvious motivation for maintaining a language with international position and economically strong majority territories is derived from cost-benefit considerations: the prospect of markets, employment and education opportunities. The members of German-speaking minorities seldom live together in large numbers and they have neighbours who speak other languages. Transfer of German and German-language skills largely followed the three-generations law: active use in the older generation, only passive in the middle and not at all in subsequent generations. The history of the German minority in Hungary resembles both the proud tradition and also more recent, difficult developments in other German minorities of Eastern and Central Europe.
