Hungarian verbal puzzles and the intensity of language contact

Grammaticality judgments of bilingual Hungarians in Slovakia and Ukraine vs. Yugoslavia show that overt objects are much more acceptable in the northern Slavic countries than in Yugoslavia. Two conflicting hypotheses have been advanced to explain this difference. The structural hypothesis claims that Serbian cliticization is responsible, while the socio‐historical hypothesis claims that the difference in grammaticality judgments is due to a difference in the duration of Hungarian–Slavic language contact north of and south of present‐day Hungary. Data from a seven‐country survey (N = 846) show that there is a split between judgments in the northern vs. southern Slavic countries across a wide range of linguistic variables, which discredits the structural explanation for the object pro‐drop variable, at least as the sole cause of change. Moreover, statistical analyses of 24 variables provide substantial empirical verification of Thomason and Kaufman's ‘two crucial parameters of intensity of contact in a borrowing situation’: time and level of bilingualism. It is shown that the 250 years of contact between Hungarian and Serbian has resulted in much smaller contact effects than the thousand‐year‐old contact of Hungarian with the northern Slavic languages. Bilingual Hungarians who constitute a local minority in the settlements where they live systematically favor the contact‐induced variants of variables vis‐a`‐vis those who constitute a local majority.