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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 715

Part of Session 130: Language in Multilingual Cities (Other abstracts in this session)

Hungarian in Contemporary Belgrade: A Case of Compartmentalised Language?

Authors: Ilić, Marija (1); Buljanović, Sandra (2); Balla, Mónika (2)
Submitted by: ilić, Marija Radovan (Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Serbia)

This paper attempts to open a dialogue on monolingualism / multilingualism in the city of Belgrade today. The city of Belgrade, has more than 1,700.000 inhabitants, with more than 10% of the population whose native language is not Serbian. Apart from the majority Serbian, languages spoken in the city can be roughly divided into two groups: that of Serbian national minority groups (such as Hungarian, Albanian, Roma, Romanian, Greek, etc., and a recently formed one – Chinese) and that of so called ‘world languages’ (such as English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, etc.). Beyond any doubt, the most popular and widely spoken language in Belgrade after Serbian is English, which serves as the lingua franca between native Belgraders and foreigners. Nevertheless, native languages of the Belgrade ethno-linguistic minority groups are very rarely spoken in public places being mostly confined to institutions whose programmatic objectives are to promote the use of those languages (e.g. languages schools) or to family domain. This paper thus aims to problematise the notion of Belgrade as a multingual city, i.e. to analyse what type of multilingualism in this case we can really speak of. This we hope to achieve by using a case study of the Hungarian language.
Hungarian language use in Serbia has been a subject of many studies, but almost all of them have been related to Vojvodina, the northern Serbian province, where Hungarians represent a significant minority. Nevertheless, the use of Hungarian in Belgrade has been overlooked by academic concerns, probably due to the small number of Hungarian speakers, with no more than 2,000 native speakers. We would like thus to indicate possible trends in the Hungarian language use in Belgrade today.  The data collection instruments used in this research are sociolinguistic questionnaires. For the data analysis we use methods of quantitative analysis, interactive and critical sociolinguistics. By analysing domains of Hungarian language use, in a previous research, we came to the conclusion that Hungarian can serve as an example of ‘compartmentalised language’. Namely, we found that Hungarian is confined only to those public domains in which its use is institutionalised, e.g. Department of Hungarian Language and Literature of the University of Belgrade, the Hungarian Embassy, and the Catholic Church of St. Peter. In this paper, we would like to take a step forward by comparing data from our survey regarding the domains of language use, on one hand, with data on interpersonal communication and interactive settings, on the other hand.
Our work has thus several theoretical and practical implications. The main theoretical implication of this research is to be found in (re)thinking multlingualism in the big cities of South-East Europe, such as Belgrade. In this respect, a critical stance will be taken on monolingualising tendencies of the state and its institutions. Furthermore, practical implications of the research will be in pointing out those urban localities in Belgrade which have potentials for a developing multilingualism and to put an effort into enhancing the preconditions for the city’s multlingualism development.