Az új Európa nyelvei. Antoine Meillet és az első finnugor tanszék Párizsban
Languages in the New Europe. Antoine Meillet and the First Finno-Ugric Chair in Paris

Summary/Abstract: The open letter (The place of the Hungarian language on the Globe, 1930) that Dezső Kosztolányi (1885–1936) wrote to the most important French linguist of his time, Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), is well known to the Hungarian public. Kosztolányi’s essay does not paint a sympathetic picture of the French linguist, since it reminds of the unflattering statements he made about the Hungarian language and culture in his book Les Langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (1918, 1928). But Meillet was in his time a linguist and a figure of French intellectual life whose influence went beyond the frontiers, and his work continues to exert an influence today not only in the field of linguistic research and university teaching of foreign languages in France, but also for Finno-Ugric studies. Despite the fact that, during the years of the First World War, he repeatedly expressed the view that there was little point in the survival of the Hungarian language in the “new Europe”, he worked with great consistency and perseverance from the turn of the century onwards to establish a framework for the study of Finno-Ugric languages in France at institutional level. It was largely thanks to his work that the first French chair of Finno-Ugric languages was created in 1931 at the École nationale des langues orientales in Paris.

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