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Dimensions of linguistic otherness: prospects of minority language maintenance in Hungary

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Abstract

After some preliminary remarks on minority policy and potential impacts of Eastern enlargement of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe, we give a brief overview of the basic characteristics of the sociolinguistic and ideological context, as well as of minority policy and legislation concerning autochthonous minorities in Hungary. In the next section of the paper we introduce the results of a national sociolinguistic language shift survey conducted by the authors, focusing here on the comparative data on language and identity of the six communities studied. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the attitudes of the Romanian and Serbian communities to mother tongue and national identity. Research results presented in our article demonstrate that the language-identity link is not self-evident: these concepts need to be separated if real linguistic (and ethnic) arrangements are to be understood. Analysis of the ‘architecture’ of the respective ethnic identities and the role of minority languages in the construction and negotiation of identities revealed that the native language plays different roles within the studied communities.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Nemzeti Kutatási és Fejlesztési Programok [the National Research & Development Programme] 5/126/2001, by the European Commission Contract No 029124 (CIT6) SSA, by Bolyai János Kutatási ÖsztÖndíj [Bolyai János Research Fellowship] BO/00332/02, and by Országos Tudományos Kutatási Alapprogramok [Hungarian Scientific Research Fund] M45689. The authors wish to express their thanks to András Vargha for conducting statistical analyses for this research with the MiniStat statistical program package. Our thanks are also due to Patrick Stevenson for the attention he paid to the paper during the editing process, and to our colleagues Andrea Szőnyi and Judit Kuti for their useful comments on a previous version of this paper.

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Correspondence to Csilla Bartha.

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Anna Borbély is a Senior Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is also a scientific collaborator at the Research Institute of the Romanian Minority in Hungary. Her primary research interests are in the fields of sociolinguistics and bilingualism.

Csilla Bartha is Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and a senior research fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, bilingualism, especially language shift and revitalization of minority languages, language policy, discourse analysis.

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Bartha, C., Borbély, A. Dimensions of linguistic otherness: prospects of minority language maintenance in Hungary. Lang Policy 5, 337–365 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-006-9029-0

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