Since bilingualism is so widespread within the European context, it is not surprising that it is a hotly debated issue in the area of sociolinguistics. However, it is not only its characteristics, types or factors taken into account when describing this linguistic phenomenon that deserve special attention but its related domains as well, which strongly contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon. One such domain is language shift, whereby members of a bilingual community abandon the less prestigious language of the two for adopting the dominant one, replacing this way bilingualism with monolingualism. The other domain is language maintenance, which, as its name also suggests, refers to a situation where minority members of a community try to maintain their own language beside the dominant one, assuring in this way the continuity of bilingualism. Out of these two linguistic phenomena, it is language maintenance to which we should pay more attention because the linguistic context of the world provides a lot fewer examples for it than for language shift. In my thesis I would like to present one such rare example, in which a minority group, namely the Hungarian minority group of Nagyszalonta, takes active steps for the maintenance of their mother tongue, that is, the Hungarian language.