The Hungarian Purist Award – Sándor Balogh: There’s no business without culture

Sándor Balogh, the president of the African-Hungarian Union (AHU) and the founder of Hungarian Trade & Cultural Centre (HTCC) was awarded with the Hungarian Purist Award. He talked about the year of 2015, his plans and faith.

Globoport.hu writes that he works a lot on preserving the Hungarian language throughout Africa. They assemble former Hungarian students who once studied here and still speak the language and want to pass it on. In HTCC they try to gratify the demand of learning Hungarian by organising screenings, language courses and giving out Hungarian books.

Sándor Balogh dedicates the money that comes with the prize, to pay language exams for 20 people in Szerencs, to help other 20 students conquer the world, and to help another 20 students in overcoming their fear of talking to foreigners.

He believes that preserving the national language is a very important task in today’s world. It gets harder and harder with the development of technology, the simplification of languages and the spreading of English. “National languages might disappear and this is something we have to prevent. We need to focus on this since it is easy to lose a language. People read so little, everything is visualised” he told globoport.hu

He firmly believes that there is no business without knowing each other’s cultures. In Africa and Asia businessmen have to know each other, they are friends. AHU wants them to know our culture so we could bring in Hungarian market, products.