The most frequent Hungarian surnames. A study of some aspects of contrastive surname typology 1 Tamás Farkas Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary Abstract: In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in geolinguistic and typological-statistical research with an international focus in the ield of surname studies. his paper will look at some of the major questions and possibilities in the case of the Hungarian surname stock. I shall carry out a typological-statistical analysis concentrating on the 100 most common surnames, focusing on certain methodological aspects, which, in my view, have received less than due atention in earlier studies. he research also aims to point out some characteristics of the surname stock in question in comparison with other European surname systems. Keywords: surname, typology, frequency, methodology, geolinguistic, Hungarian. Research into surname systems he surname stock of a language, country or community allows researchers to gain insight into many diferent ields of study, according to the interests and meth- ods of various disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches. Accordingly, in the major- ity of European countries signiicant eforts have been, or are being made to describe the structure, composition and geographical distribution of their surname stock. he indings, unsurprisingly, show noteworthy diferences, which are oten linked to national borders and the historic-geographic presence of a language and its speaking community. Naturally, some characteristics of a certain surname stock can become more striking if analysed in comparison with other surname stocks, while a comprehensive study of the entire European surname stock could provide a beter understanding of the linguistic, geographical, cultural, social, and historic characteristics of the European population. In order to do this, certain conditions must be met. Similar studies have to be carried out in several countries, based on the most representative name corpuses available and using a similar methodology, so that the indings are comparable. his presupposes large-scale international cooperation and coordination eforts, while the 1 he paper was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I wish to express my gratitude to E. Shokhenmayer, P. Chareille, P. Darlu and J. N. Fodor for giving me access to their work as cited in my paper and the indings of their research. I’m thankful to I. Kövesdi and A. Romhányi for the generous technical support they have provided with the processing of the data.