Kins and Relatives in front of the Store: Virtual Homecoming to a Vojvodina Hungarian Village

Abstract

The paper discusses two Facebook pages, Rokon Ilonka Copyright and University of Botelott, popular among Hungarians from Vojvodina (Serbia). The two pages post memes on the topics of everyday life in Vojvodina and use a local dialect of Hungarian that is commonly regarded as uneducated and “peasant”. Through a multimodal analysis of the posted memes and the comments to them in the two pages, interviews with their authors, as well as the answers of the followers of the University of Botelott page, I explore the effects of Hungarian kin-state politics on the Vojvodina Hungarian community. In the past decade, a large number of Vojvodina Hungarians emigrated to Western Europe. This has made the community increasingly diasporic, and together with economic and ecological disadvantages, the emigration created a negative (self-)vision of the community. In the paper I show that using a sub-standard and stigmatized dialect as a way of speaking mastered only by the members of the community transforms belonging to it into a positive experience. Second, I argue that the topics of everyday life in Vojvodina imbued with humor and nostalgia maintain the community regardless of the place of residence. The topics of the memes and comments, the language use, the humor and the nostalgia therefore construct an affirmative minority and/or diaspora identity of the followers of the page.