Hungarians living outside Hungary left the country in various ways: Some were voluntary migrants who began to seek economic opportunity or political asylum, while others became involuntary immigrants to neighboring countries when the Treaty of Trianon shrank the borders of Hungary by two-thirds in 1920. Because these involuntary minorities were difficult for researchers to discuss under the communist regimes that ruled until 1989 (p. 4), this edited volume introduces a recent body of research that previously has been published mostly in Hungarian.

The chapters contribute data on the relationship between patterns of language maintenance and shift and sociolinguistic variables such as loyalties, status, ideologies, religious affiliation, heterogeneity and mobility of communities, political repression or support, and the availability of mother-tongue education at various levels. In particular, the voluntary immigrant communities, as well as communities with small minority populations and less bilingual education, are shown to have much greater rates of language attrition and change than majority Hungarian villages and towns outside present-day Hungary. Attrition of certain registers is also shown to come about when use in those registers is restricted by various forces. Interestingly, some modernization is leading to more maintenance of standard Hungarian as commerce across formerly closed borders increases (Csanád Bodó, 247).

The book also speaks to the phenomena of language contact and change across typological boundaries, as Hungarian, a Uralic language, comes into contact with various Indo-European languages, which are typologically different in many ways (Sarah Grey Thomason, 11–27). Casper de Groot uses previous work on language universals to show that outside varieties of Hungarian are changing along several parameters toward the settings present in the Indo-European contact languages. The parameters discussed by de Groot were tested across many countries using a questionnaire of grammatical preference judgments as part of the Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary (SHOH) project. In chap. 2, Miklós Kontra explains the organization and methods of this project, which also collected information about speakers' loyalty to regions, countries, and language varieties as well as their patterns of language use in various domains. Most of the case study chapters use data from this project.

The middle eight chapters present case studies of Hungarian communities in the United States, Australia, and all of Hungary's bordering countries except Croatia. Particularly interesting is Klára Sándor's chapter on the Csángó Hungarian speakers of Romania, who emigrated from the Carpathian Basin beginning in the 14th century. All of these chapters have the same structure: They begin with demographic information about the communities and histories of the various regions, move to sociolinguistic analyses of the situations, and end with linguistic analyses of the local varieties of Hungarian. They provide excellent, concise synopses of prior work, most of which is published in eastern European languages, and all the background information needed for planning future research. The book as a whole is a valuable resource for sociolinguistics scholars who wish to familiarize themselves with the case of Hungarian or who may want to conduct research on these newly accessible populations.