The study deals with the impact of the racial discourse on the nationality question in Hungary during the age of dualism between 1867 and 1918. In particular, it is concerned with the images of the so called Magyarization produced by the Slovak national movement. In the 1870s and 1880s the Slovak nationalists tried to prove that the Slovaks who allegedly had belonged to the "Aryan" race could have not be assimilated by the "inferior" races as the oriental Magyars.