Dimensions of linguistic otherness: prospects of minority language maintenance in Hungary (original) (raw)

Although these researches provide a wealth of data from different bilingual speech communities, comparative sociolinguistic research on the linguistic practices or language shift patterns had been a hardly studied scientific area. Between 2001 and 2004 the authors conducted the first national sociolinguistic survey on linguistic and social change in seven linguistic minorities with non-Hungarian ethnolinguistic backgrounds entitled "Dimensions of linguistic otherness: Prospects of minority language maintenance in Hungary", with a special focus on local models of language shift and maintenance. Besides the Romanian, Slovakian, Croation, Serbian, German, Romani and Boyash minorities, culturally Deaf people as members of a highly discriminated linguistic community were also included in the analysis. Our comparative research combines theories and methods of quantitative sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, social psychology and the language ideology approach. In the present paper, after clarifying the notion of language shift, we give a brief overview of some sociolinguistic and ideological questions as well as of minority policy and legislation concerning autochtonous minorities in Hungary. In the second part of the paper, we present and compare data on attitudes to mother tongue and nationality identification among the Romanian and Serbian communities. 1.2. Theoretical background Sociolinguistic aspects of language shift and maintenance are approached here in terms of social, linguistic and ideological changes: ways of acting in and responding to a dominant, and often hegemonic social world in a majority language context (see Bartha, 1999). In many multilingual sociolinguistic situations where bilingualism of a sociologically nondominant group is being transformed into a new, monolingual situation, language shift is, as Gal (1996) claims, "a dramatic instance of how social function, sociopolitical context, and cultural evaluation can affect language" (p. 586). Many of those studying language contact identify exclusively one particular case of repression of a minority language as shift, a type that may be called 'gradual language shift' (see Fase et al., 1992, p. 3). It should be emphasized, nevertheless, that a linear, unidirectional depiction of the process often leads to stereotypic interpretations. Opting for a more complex and multiple-level explanation, rather than a formal/informal axis, description is reinforced by © Csilla Bartha and Anna Borbély. Not for citation or distribution without permission of the authors. 2 examples in which repression of a language takes place in the opposite direction, on the one hand, and the diverse networks of the same community can respond differently to the social, economic, political, cultural, etc. changes, on the other. A central issue of many studies on language shift is the correlation between social determinants and their effects on language. We also focus (as Gal did in 1979, p.3) on the "process of language shift", and also on the questions Kulick (1992) has raised criticizing the explanatory power of macrosociological factors: