Claims about the effect of the typewriter

As stated above, until 1980 practically all typewriters lacked three keys from the full Hungarian alphabet, those for the long high vowels. Native speakers of the language were therefore exposed to many documents that had been written without a complete alphabet. Several linguists have claimed that the defective keyboard made it harder than necessary to learn Hungarian spelling and has had a detrimental effect on the development of Standard Hungarian. For example, Juhász (1940) claimed that typewritten texts damaged not only people's spelling but also "the language". In 1965, the term írógépnyelv 'typewriter language' gained currency at a conference on orthoepy, when Pásztor (1967: 173) spoke about the formation of a typewriter language whose chief characteristic was the uncertain and variable quantity of long high vowels. Varga (1968: 76) held a different opinion: she argued that because variation was considerable, the lack of the keys for long high vowels was not a significant problem. And because the phonetic and phonemic differences between the long and short high vowels were small, they did not cause communication breakdowns. Studies in the literature recognized inter-speaker variability in the pronunciation of high vowels spelled long according to the official orthography, but they also made claims about the spread of short vowels at the expense of long ones. As early as 1938 Laziczius (1938: 308-309) stated that the process of shortening was "at a rather advanced stage" in Standard Hungarian.