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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 924

Part of Session 166: Indigenous Minority Languages in Urban Areas (Other abstracts in this session)

Bilingual language use and identity. The case of bilingual Hungarians of Romania

Authors: Horváth, István
Submitted by: Horváth, István (The Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Romania)

The 1.5 million large Hungarian ethno-linguistic minority living in Romania is one of the largest of European indigenous minorities. Beside its size, the degree of territorial concentration, the legal and institutional support speakers of Hungarian benefit of confers a considerably solid sociolinguistic position for this language. Nevertheless if considering the internal diversity of this group in terms of the linguistic structure of the local speech communities we can easily observe a considerable internal differentiation. Though (with some insignificant exceptions) all Hungarians have some degree of competence of Romanian roughly one third of them are living in virtually only Hungarian speech communities (with the major exception of the institutional domains subordinated to the central government). While the rest – in order to be fully functional in their daily lives – need to alternate in a rather large variety of domains and contexts Hungarian with Romanian. The rather different experiences of bilingual practices are grounded in rather different language use norms, that finally result a differentiated view of the linguistic social order and the cultural self as part of this order. Or, to put it differently, different type of bilingual practices are indexical for different types of societal structures (Baetens Beardsmore 1986; Mansour 1993) providing for a different context of identity construction and negotiation.

Drawing on a recent large scale survey on a representative sample of Hungarians of Romania (N-3200), based on variables related to bilingual practices, language use norms and forms of valuation and validation of the use of Romanian by the native Hungarian speakers a typology of ethno-linguistic identity of this minority group will be outlined.