According to the 2001 report by the Committee of Experts on the implementation of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, Hungary “has undertaken an ambitious effort in drafting a form of a model legislation on the protection of minorities”.[1]
Since the political changes in 1990, Hungary has established internal legal and institutional frameworks for the protection of minorities, such as the Act on self-governments. This Act gives all recognised national and ethnic minorities the right to establish minorityself-governments on a local and national level. At this very moment over athousand local and thirteen national self-governments exist. The main tasks and responsibilities of these self-governments lie in guaranteeing autonomy in education and culture. In order to achieve this the elected local governments have the right to establish and run cultural and educational institutions. The main task of minority representatives on a national level is professional monitoring of minority education. These national representatives are elected by the local self-governments.[2]
From a Western-European point of view, the Hungarianlanguage policy is considered to be a favourable exception to the common Eastern-European minority language policy. Especially because Hungary has a so-called “Office for National and Ethnic Minorities”, an institution that operates independantly, doing its job under the authority of the Hungarian government. The managing director of the office is appointed by the prime minister of Hungary and the office is supervised bythe Hungarian department of justice. Moreover the Hungarian government set up a “Public Foundation for Minorities” and a Public Foundation for Hungarian Roma’s. However, practical implementations of the legal standards are not always optimal, according to Pan (2002). Discrimination of the Roma’s is still common practice in daily life in Hungary and, taking the other language minorities in Hungary into consideration, a lot of work is left to be carried out in the fields of media, education and participation in daily life in general.[3]
 
Hungary signed (1992), ratified (1995) and implemented (1998) the European Charter for Regional and Minority languages. Hungary ratified the Charter in the field of education for the following languages:Croatian, German, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian and Slovenian. It is striking that Hungary always signed only the last section of paragraph 1, article 8 (education) of the Charter, which seems to state that the government is expected to undertake only minimal action when it comes to minority education. According to the Charter Hungarian government should because of that, tolerate, stimulate and encourage education in minority languages. The Charter does not however, impose a law on Hungary to create facilities for education in the active manner that it does. Also, it does not force Hungary to offer education for all minority languages, but only for those pupils whose families requesteducation in their own language (other than the majority language), and only if there are enough of them.[4]
Hungary also signed (1995), ratified (1995) and implemented (1998) the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.
Hungary made agreements with neighbouring countries concerning its minority languages. Because of that some minority language communities in Hungary can make use of learning materials of its hinterland, where teachers also can be educated. Wit this policy, Hungary hopes that its neighbouring countries will treat their Hungarian minorities in a proper way as well (e.g. the Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc.).
According to Christoph Pan (2002) there are three types of “minority language schools” in Hungary: schools where all students are taught in the minority language; bilingual schools where every subject is taught in both languages (Hungarian – ML) and bilingual schools where one half of the curriculum is taught in Hungarian and the other half is taught in the minority language.[5]
 
Hungary has nursery-schools in which national minority languages such as German, Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Serbian and Slovenian are used either as the only instructive language, or as an instructive language next to Hungarian (bilingual nursery-schools). There are, especially in comparison to the other minority language nursery-schools, a lot of German language or bilingual German-Hungarian nursery schools: 263 out of the 401 minority language nursery-schools are German or German-Hungarian. In the 1999/2000 school-year Hungary counted a total of 19.419 pupils in minority language nursery-schools, 14.141 of which were in German or German-Hungarian nursery-schools.
In Hungary there are minority language primary schools for the German, Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian and Greek language communities. Again, the majority of schools uses German as (one of) the language(s) of instruction: out of the 54,876 pupils studying at a minority language school, 46,254  are doing so at a school where the German language is used as a medium of instruction. The same goes for minority language education at secondary school level. Education in secondary schools is provided in Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Romany, Serbian, Slovenian and German. However, there are not that many minority language secondary schools: 23 altogether, which count 2,825 studens in total, of which 1,978 are in one of the thirteen German schools (For the exact numbers of minority language schools and pupils on these schools in Hungary on all three educational levels, see the tables 2, 3 and 4 below).
 
The Roma’s in Hungary speak Hungarian, Romany (the Oláh or the Beás variant) and (archaic) Romanian. The exact number of Roma’s is not known; estimates differ from 142.000 to 600.000. According to a report written under the authority of the European Parliament from 2001, 48.000 Roma’s speak Romany as their mother tongue. According to other sources 150.000 Roma’s in Hungary speak a variety of Romany as their first language.[6]
However, there are 189 pre-primary schools where half of the pupils belong to the Roma-community. In the 2001 report by the Committee of Experts on the implementation of the Charter in Hungary recommendations were made to organize bilingual education (Romany Hungarian) for Roma’s in Hungary, in order to improve the social integration of Roma’s in society and to preserve the language and cultural identity of the Roma communities. At the same time it would be a good weapon against the traditional discrimination of Roma’s.  Today, there is one secondary school in Hungary where Romany is the language of instruction for 118 pupils. There are no schools on pre-primary or primary level where Romany is the medium of instruction.
 
According to the data of the Ethnologue Report of Hungary (www.ethnologue.com; SIL International), languages like Macedonian, Osetin and Yiddish are also spoken in Hungary. However, there are no numbers mentioned for these languages. It may very well be that among the people who said that they where native speakers of Greek, there were in fact some who speak Macedonian as their mother tongue, but were born as Greek citizins. The numbers of (native) speakers of Osetin and Yiddish are probably very small. There is no education in these minority languages in Hungary.
 
Table 1