The first Hungarian novel, András Dugonics’s „Etelka” was a very popular novel at the end of the 18th century, because its historical background was the time of the Hungarian conquest. Its main stylistic feature is that the language of the novel is full of phrasemes and regionalisms, especially local folk phraseology of Szeged. The third edition was rewritten by Dugonics in Szeged dialect although the regional speech was not accepted in literature at that time, because standardisation had already begun. Even though the language of the third edition of the novel is characterised by the main feature of the Szeged dialect (e.g. standard e: dialectal ö in certain syllables, köröszt vs. standard kereszt ‘cross’), we do not find any other dialectal features in the language of the novel. In this paper I demonstrate, that there is a difference between the narratives and the dialogues in the use of dialectal features
