The International Association of Hungarian Studies was born of the recognition that Hungarian philology or, more broadly speaking, Hungarian studies in general had already come to represent an international scholarly discipline in the same way as the study of other languages, literatures and national civilizations had developed into coherent disciplines like Germanistics and Turkology etc. The association enables the regular exchange of information between the scholars of the various countries involved and in this way promotes wide-ranging research into the Hungarian language, literature, ethnography and culture, free from any national bias. Through this new organization, Hungarian studies has been able to become an integral part of international scholarship and to secure representation within the scholarly organizational structure of UNESCO.