Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia: Schoolchildren’s attitudes to their languages (minority vs. majority languages vs. EFL) and the teaching of these languages in schools (original) (raw)
Hungarian Studies Yearbook, 2022
The latest research conducted in the Hungarian community of the City of Zagreb has shown that the Hungarian language is slowly losing its communication functions in informal domains (family, friends, the sphere of intimacy) and is withdrawing before Croatian, i.e., that language shift is in progress. As one of the key factors affecting language shift, school is mentioned as support in families in intergenerational language transmission and language preservation in the community. Croatia has ensured an institutional framework for education in minority languages to its minorities through a series of regulatory acts. However, exercising this right is often followed by numerous difficulties. In case of the Hungarian minority, this is due to geographical dispersity. Nevertheless, during the 1990s, a Hungarian group in kindergarten, a bilingual class and nurturing language for primary-and secondary-school pupils were launched in Zagreb. In order to obtain a clearer image of how various class models in a minority language actually function and which problems their participants are faced with, we conducted a preliminary research among younger members of the community who attended classes in Hungarian at least at one point during their education. We completed the results with information obtained through informal conversations with preschool and school teachers as well as through immediate observations of the community.
Multilingua, 2022
The case study of the article is translanguaging as an educational strategy in preparation for the graduation exam in Romanian language and literature in a Hungarian school in Miercurea Ciuc/Csíkszereda, Romania. Romanian language competence scores are at the bottom of national rankings in this Hungarian-majority town in Szeklerland. Students who speak a minority language have their knowledge of the majority language evaluated in the graduation exam in Romanian language and literature based on the same criteria as first-language speakers', which has strong implications for their participation in Romanian society. The main research question of this ethnographically informed article is how translanguaging happens in a classroom where students' first language is being used with the aim of facilitating performance in their second language. The article argues that in the classrooms where the research was conducted, translanguaging is a strategy that negotiates between students' educational needs in the local environment and the expectation espoused by the state to perform as if they were monolingual Romanian speakers. Similarly, students use translanguaging to strategize between the curricular expectations and their language performance. Yet, I argue that in this case study the emancipatory potential of translanguaging is limited due to ethnolinguistic hierarchies that remain unchallenged.
Hungarian Studies Yearbook
The latest research conducted in the Hungarian community of the City of Zagreb has shown that the Hungarian language is slowly losing its communication functions in informal domains (family, friends, the sphere of intimacy) and is withdrawing before Croatian, i.e., that language shift is in progress. As one of the key factors affecting language shift, school is mentioned as support in families in intergenerational language transmission and language preservation in the community. Croatia has ensured an institutional framework for education in minority languages to its minorities through a series of regulatory acts. However, exercising this right is often followed by numerous difficulties. In case of the Hungarian minority, this is due to geographical dispersity. Nevertheless, during the 1990s, a Hungarian group in kindergarten, a bilingual class and nurturing language for primary- and secondary-school pupils were launched in Zagreb. In order to obtain a clearer image of how various...
Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2018
A large body of academic literature (e.g. Fishman 1977, 1999; Giles and Johnson 1981; Romaine 2000, among others) claims that language is one of the most significant markers of ethnic identification and that it plays a crucial role not only in the external perception of an ethnic group by outsiders but also in the selfidentification of an ethnic group. In a minority environment, sense of ethnic identity and language retention are connected very tightly, which is why it is of extreme importance to study attitudes towards the dialects of a language and value judgments about them. The paper presents the results of a research into attitudes toward dialects, conducted with approximately three hundred 5th and 8th grade pupils (age 12 and 15, respectively) attending school in Hungarian in two regions of Vojvodina, Serbia. It explores the subjects' local features of identity, given that the research was conducted in eight different localities. The results of the research serve as a sound basis for developing use-centered, functionalsituational mother tongue education of Hungarian minority pupils living in Serbia, since the current curriculum completely disregards the language varieties of many Hungarian minority pupils brought up and living in rural areas, who acquire and use the dialect spoken in the family.
The Politics of Language Policies: Hungarian Linguistic Minorities in Central Europe
Politeja
The paper will adopt the position that language is an intrinsic and largely non‑negotiable part of individual culture and identity. The recognition of one’s own language receives more and more support in international political and institutional frameworks. The promotion of linguistic diversity is the official policy of the European Union. Due to such policies, it is to be expected that languages will remain in contact in the context of all sorts of levels of governance. In order to manage linguistic diversity in multilingual and multicultural areas, the introduction of a global regime of language policies is unavoidable. These policies will need to satisfy transnational requirements and conditions, like universal human rights and the norms and standards of Europeanization set by the EU, OSCE, Council of Europe, and so on. However, because there are manifold connections between language and power, as we know from the work of political scientists such as Pierre Bourdieu, and sociolin...
The Impact of Hungarian on Slovak Language Use in Bilingual Milieu
Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies, 2020
This paper as an output of the sociolinguistic project EFOP-3.4.3-16-2016-00023 presents the outcomes of a field research of the relationship between language and thought under the impact of contacts of the Hungarian and Slovak language influenced by analogical grammatical transfer. We intend to present the contact of Hungarian and Slovak spoken by bilinguals with the methods of sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. The interpretation is based on the theory of the analogy in language, contact and cognitive linguistics. The paper sets out to analyze morphological aspects of the variety and reflects on the relation of language, thought and culture in the two languages by comparing varieties of languages in bilingual milieu.
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies
In our presentation we will examine the diversity of linguistic attitudes of Hungarian speakers in Romania. Although there are several definitions for this concept from psychology and linguistics, linguistic attitudes are generally understood as the value judgments and attitudes that individuals form on the basis of their language socialization, language use and learning experience, in relation to languages, language varieties and language expressions. In our present research, we wanted to find out the speakers’ value judgments about the phenomenon of using Romanian and/or English loanwords in their everyday Hungarian communication. In our research paradigm we adopted a case-oriented, inductive, data-focused research towards which we applied a mixed approach: the data was collected through a questionnaire, then the focus group discussion highlighted the criteria respondents used in their value judgment, as well as their opinions about loanwords adopted from the two languages. The co...
Hungarian Yearbook, 2022
Borders are particular (in-between) spaces: they have this side and the other side, which involve several real and imaginary spaces simultaneously. For minorities, “beyond the borders” is also a specific space of language use. This paper discusses the correlations between minority bilingualism and social structure characteristics based on sociological surveys, taking as an approach the sociology of space and John Ogbu’s ecological cultural model of schooling. It aims to offer an overview of my research on this topic and provide some references for rethinking the sociological implications of minority education considering the experiences of three decades since the fall of communism in Romania. This study is centred on the aspects of the interrelation between the language of education and the labour market, more specifically on those linked to the attitudes and patterns of behaviour towards the official language, with a particular focus on the role that languages play in the society and, in a narrower sense, in self-positioning on the labour market.
Multilingualism and Education in Transylvania
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica,, 2015
The topic of this paper is the situation of language skills and a determining factor of it in minority context: languages of instruction in Transylvania. Presenting the socio-demographic context and the status of languages as they are manifested in language skills. Language skills are presented referring to mother tongue skills, second and foreign language competence. The paper emphasizes that the connection between schooling, education, and language usage is evident in the case of minority languages since the instruction in minority languages is a key factor for the maintenance of the language. The empirical data used in the paper come from several sources, most important of them being a sociolinguistic survey in a representative sample of Hungarians in Transylvania carried out by The Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities (Cluj/Kolozsvár) in 2009.