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SMK: Our Billboards in Hungarian Are Protest Against Language Act
Friday 30 April 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, April 30 (TASR) - The placing of Hungarian language-only election billboards by the ethnic-Hungarian SMK party in selected areas of Slovakia is designed as a protest against the State Language Act, head of SMK's country-wide council Ivan Farkas told a press conference on Friday.
"This is how we communicate with both our former and potential voters, and that's why we want to communicate with them in their mother tongue," said Farkas.
According to party vice-chairman Jozsef Berenyi, it's biased to ask if, by deploying billboards only in Hungarian, the party aims to seek voter-support only among ethnic-Hungarians living in Slovakia.
Berenyi reiterated the aspect of protest in SMK's initiative, adding that SMK's leaflets containing its programme priorities are dual-language. "The remainder of our communication is dual-language, so we're interested in every voter in Slovakia," he asserted.
According to SMK vice-chair in charge of culture Agnes Biro, Hungarian isn't a foreign language that's been imported into Slovakia. "Perhaps if the Hungarian minority were looked on as citizens who contribute to producing values and (it were recognised) that we offer our culture, then seeing some writing in the language of 10 percent of the population wouldn't be insulting," she said, adding that nobody is taken aback or offended by purely English-language billboards.
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