During the 20th century Transcarpathia region belonged to several different states: the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, Czechoslovakia, the independent Carpatho-Ukraine, the Hungarian Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and finally to Ukraine. Today Transcarpathia borders on four member states of the European Union (Poland, the Slovak Republic, Hungary and Romania) and due to its history several ethnicities and languages, several religions and many cultures live side by side in the region. However, as a consequence of the different language and minority policies in Transcarpathia we cannot find a common language that everybody knows independently from age, gender, education, religion or place. The lack of the lingua franca makes the dialogue between ethnicities difficult, even impossible. In practice it means that Ukrainians do not interested in the high-class performances of the Hungarian Theatre, while Hungarians do not read poems and novels of the Ukrainian writers. Russians do not take care either the Ukrainian or the Hungarian culture. And unfortunately each of the ethnicities estranged from the Roma community. In our paper we would like to outline the main features of the regional, minority and language policies of the different states with the purpose of prevention. We hope that the in-depth analysis of the history of this region can help us to avoid further mistakes and can find a model that could be useful not only in the region but also in the wider context like such multinational, linguistically diverse, culturally colourful territories as the Carpathian Basin and states in East-Central Europe.
