16.3124, Review: Socioling/Finno-Ugric Lang: Fenyvesi (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3124. Fri Oct 28 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3124, Review: Socioling/Finno-Ugric Lang: Fenyvesi (2005)

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1)
Date: 27-Oct-2005
From: Éva Forintos < szentsz at almos.vein.hu >
Subject: Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 20:12:23
From: Éva Forintos < szentsz at almos.vein.hu >
Subject: Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary 
 

EDITOR: Fenyvesi, Anna
TITLE: Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary
SUBTITLE: Studies on Hungarian as a minority language
SERIES: Impact: Studies in language and society 20
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing Company
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2004.html 

Éva Forintos, University of Veszprém, Hungary

INTRODUCTION
As discussed by Fenyvesi (1995) immigrant languages have been documented 
and shown to be different from standard languages used in their 
respective "native countries" in a large number of studies. As for the 
situation of Hungarian, as an "immigrant" language it is worth quoting 
Kontra's words: 'One of the enormous debts of honour of Hungarian 
linguistics is that far from ever considering the linguistic consequences 
of Trianon, our linguists have never carried out any empirical research on 
the varieties of Hungarian across the border.' (Kontra 1999: 59-60 
[reviewer's translation]) Despite the deficiencies mentioned above, it can 
be stated that the study of the effects of language contact between 
Hungarian and other languages have been a focal point of interest to 
linguists since the beginning of the twentieth century, but only during 
the last few decades has it gained ground.

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK'S PURPOSE AND CONTENTS

The book is organised in eight chapters, each providing a case study 
covering a situation where Hungarian is a minority language, and extended 
by three further chapters, the purpose of which is to contextualize the 
case studies from various perspectives. The chapters are preceded by lists 
of tables, of figures, of maps and of abbreviations. The editor, A. 
Fenyvesi, is a prominent scholar in the field, who has remained at the 
forefront of language contact research for the last few years. At the end 
of the book a comprehensive bibliography (roughly 500 entries) is followed 
by a subject index.

The volume under review presents the most comprehensive collection of 
studies in English on Hungarian as a minority language available to the 
date of the publication of the book, and includes papers on all language 
contact situations involving Hungarian outside Hungary that had been 
studied in detail. The editorial aims of the book are complex and 
manifold: "(i) it aims to contribute to a description of varieties of 
Hungarian existing outside of Hungary; (ii) it offers in-depth analyses 
for a better understanding of sociolinguistic variation in language 
contact situations, and (iii) it attempts to provide an insight into 
typological aspects of language change under the conditions of language 
contact". (p 1)

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Chapter 1, titled "Typological and theoretical aspects of Hungarian in 
contact with other languages", surveys broad typological similarities and 
differences between Hungarian and relevant Indo-European languages, and 
considers some theoretical implications of this survey for contact-induced 
language change that Hungarian is likely to undergo. In her paper, 
Thomason attempts to make predictions about the kinds of changes that are 
likely to take place under contact conditions discussed in the book. She 
draws attention to the fact, however, that in the area of contact induced 
language change social factors are very important. The phenomenon of 
language death, which is brought about by social factors and often 
manifested linguistically by a combination of attrition and assimilation 
to a "conquering" language through borrowing, is especially important for 
the study of Hungarian outside Hungary.

In Chapter 2, titled "Contextualizing the Sociolinguistics of Hungarian 
Outside Hungary project", Kontra reports extensively on the socio-
historical background of linguistic research on minority Hungarians, 
emphasizing that in all the language contact studies of the field, 
etymology was important and no attention was paid to any other contact 
effects; grammatical borrowing, for example, was absolutely ignored. He 
gives an almost exhaustive summary and evaluation of bilingualism and 
language contact research in terms of the Hungarian language; he makes no 
mention, however, of Rot's work (Rot 1991) in which, besides other contact 
situations, he discusses English in contact with Hungarian (1991: 173-
200), differentiating between "non-marginal, marginal and intraregional" 
contact situations, whereby Hungarian comes in contact with different 
languages (Rot 1991: 201-244) and pays special attention to (i) Hungarian-
Iranian language contacts; (ii) Hungarian-Turkic language contacts; (iii) 
Hungarian-Slavic (or Slavonic) language contacts; (iv) Hungarian-Byzantine 
Greek language contacts; (v) Hungarian-Romance language contacts and the 
results of their linguistic interference in Hungarian. 

Rot names the authors, who, according to him, 'carried out successful 
attempts to reconstruct the history of a great number of Anglicisms, 
Americanisms, Canadianisms, and Australianisms in the Hungarian language' 
(Rot 1991: 175). Moreover, the immigrant Hungarian-Australians and their 
language have been studied recently by one of the contributors of the 
present volume, i.e. Kovács, and Hatoss (2003, 2004). The rest of Kontra's 
paper concentrates on the Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary 
(SHOH) project, which was the first large-scale sociolinguistic study of 
contact varieties of Hungarian spoken in the countries neighbouring 
Hungary. The analysis follows the guidelines used in Hans Goebl et al 
(eds), (1997) so it covers fields such as: geography and demography, 
territorial history and national development, politics, economy and 
general cultural and religious situation, statistics and ethnoprofiles 
between 1900 and 1990, the sociolinguistic situation, presentation of 
language contact and contact languages, language conflicts, diglossia and 
bilingualism, language policy in education, administration, the mass 
media, language right (official languages) language planning, and so 
forth. There is a critical evaluation of the relevant sources and 
scholarly literature and a selected bibliography. Additionally, it 
discusses the linguistic aspects of Hungarian language use in minority 
communities, as well as the lexical and structural borrowing in the 
variety of Hungarian in question, and where relevant, and where findings 
are available, it also discusses the code-switching practices of the 
community and the presence or absence of any language attrition related 
linguistic phenomena.

Kontra presents a few analyses carried out by the participants of the 
project for illustrative purposes. In connection with analytic 
constructions, he states that in contact varieties of Hungarian, analytic 
constructions may be used where monolingual Hungarians use a more 
synthetic form, e.g., Standard Hungarian (SH) uses the compound tag-díj 
(member-fee) 'membership fee' vs. the Contact Hungarian two-word phrase 
tag-ság-i díj (member-NDER- ADER-fee). This finding can be supported by 
the Australian-Hungarian corpus, where the examples tagsági díj 
(membership fee) and tagsági gyulés (membership meeting) were found. (This 
reviewer carried out empirical research on one version of written 
Australian-Hungarian; the corpus of the research was the advertisements 
found in the 98 issues of the weekly newspaper of the Hungarian community 
in Australia.)

Chapter 3 by István Lanstyák and Gizella Szabómihály is devoted to the 
Hungarian language as used in Slovakia. In addition to sociolinguistic 
aspects, the authors deal with phenomena such as language lapses, language 
gaps, overfulfilment of the norm and manifestations of linguistic 
insecurity and base language switching. In conclusion it is stated that 
Slovak has had a relatively minor influence on Hungarian Slovak varieties 
so far, which is mainly due to the nature of the contact situation (p 85).

Chapter 4 by István Csernicskó is concerned with the status and language 
use of the Hungarian community in Subcarpathia, the autochthonous 
community, which is made up of people of Hungarian nationality and/or 
people whose mother tongue is Hungarian. The Hungarian language for 
Subcarpathian Hungarians is mainly the means of communication within their 
own group, whereas the Ukrainian and Russian languages are mainly used in 
communication between different groups. The findings of the linguistic 
analyses carried out by the author of the chapter support this statement 
because they show that in formal domains the use of Ukrainian and Russian 
is predominant among Subcarpathian Hungarians, whereas in informal domains 
Hungarian is used almost exclusively. The chapter also covers the 
phenomenon of code-switching and it comes to the conclusion that out of 
the many types of code-switching quotation occurs most frequently in the 
Hungarian community in Subcarpathia.

Chapter 5 by Attila Beno and Sándor Szilágyi N. reports extensively on the 
Hungarian community in Romania by paying special attention to the 
sociolinguistic characteristics of the speakers of Hungarian in Romania, 
together with language contact issues. The authors enumerate the most 
important factors that contribute to the decrease in the number of 
Hungarian speakers, some of which are due to emigration, a great number of 
ethnically mixed marriages and an insufficient system of education in the 
minority language. They conclude that the intensity of the Romanian 
influence mainly depends on the type of locality and level of education, 
e.g., it is strongest in the case of Hungarians living in dispersed 
communities and in those with a lower level of education. Nevertheless, 
due to a high level of loyalty to the mother tongue, as well as, the high 
cultural prestige minority Hungarians ascribe to it, the minority in 
question can still be characterised by language maintenance.

In accordance with the general goal of the book, Klára Sándor in Chapter 6 
is concerned with the unique historical and linguistic characteristics of 
the Csángós, a community of Hungarians in Romania's north-eastern region 
of Moldavia. The author draw attention to the fact that although attempts 
were made to collect sociolinguistic data based on the modified version of 
the questionnaire used in the SHOH project, only a pilot study was carried 
out. Consequently, a lack of reliable data does not allow for 
comprehensive research on the influence of Romanian on the Csángó 
dialects. Still, based on the few secondary sources of the linguistic data 
available and on her own data Sándor provides a description of the 
linguistic characteristics of Csángó varieties existing in a country where 
the language policy of the Romanian state towards the Csángós is strongly 
assimilationist, which means that they are excluded from all rights other 
minorities have, e.g., the right to have education in the mother tongue.

The main objective of Chapter 7 by Lajos Göncz and Ottó Vörös, in line 
with the rest of the chapters is to provide an overview of the situation 
of Hungarians in two different regions of former Yugoslavia, e.g., in 
Vojvodina (in Serbia and Montenegro) and in Prekmurje (in Slovenia). Göncz 
characterizes Vojvodina Hungarians' bilingualism as primarily one-sided 
and folk bilingualism, which he describes in detail on p 202. He also 
shows that their attachment to their minority is as strong as the average 
of Hungarian minority groups of the Carpathian Basin, although it is less 
strong than that of Transylvanian and Subcarpathian Hungarians. On the 
basis of the findings of linguistic research, the authors conclude that 
the contact induced changes, as well as the signs of language attrition, 
are more salient in the case of  Prekmurje Hungarians than in the case of 
Vojvodina Hungarians, which, they add, can be due to the small size of the 
population.

Chapter 8 by Csanád Bodó is devoted to the Hungarian minority in Austria 
discussing both the autochthonous community in Oberwart (Felsoor) in the 
Burgenland province of the country, and immigrant Hungarians living mostly 
in Vienna. Because of the uneven distribution of the two groups in the 
sample, the findings are mainly discussed in connection with the immigrant 
group of Hungarians in Austria, but some tentative qualitative comparisons 
of the linguistic behaviour of the two groups are made in the final 
section of the chapter.

Chapter 9 by Anna Fenyvesi, editor of the volume under review, 
concentrates on the Hungarian minority in the United States of America, 
the Hungarian Americans and their language. The description of the 
sociolinguistic aspects of the community is based on census records and 
the available comprehensive studies of the sociolinguistic and linguistic 
aspects of the four Hungarian-American communities studied by Kontra 
(1990), Bartha (1993), Fenyvesi (1995) and Polgár (2001). The 
sociolinguistic data concerning the subjects of the first three studies 
came from the subject matter of the interviews made by the researchers, 
whereas the transcripts of the interviews constituted the corpus for 
linguistic analysis. Polgár used a slightly modified version of the 
questionnaire of the SHOH project. The main contribution of the chapter is 
the subsection on the linguistic aspects, which deals with phonetic, 
phonological, morphological as well as syntactic features and it also 
discusses pragmatic borrowing.

Chapter 10 by Magdolna Kovács provides an overview of Hungarian in 
Australia, a less popular research topic until recently. In addition to 
Kovács, however, Hatoss (2003, 2004) has also contributed to this field. 
Kovács discusses the sociolinguistic factors, based on the Tandefelt 
(1988) three-dimensional model that play a role in the Hungarian language 
maintenance or shift among Australian Hungarians. The contact-induced 
changes studied in the chapter are mainly based on the author's own 
research, which extends the main results of Endrody's (1971) research. The 
chapter is unique in the sense that it is the only one to deal with 
intralingual features. These neologisms (approximately fifty in the 
author's data) are created by mixing up verbs which are close to each 
other in their meaning or form, and by mixing up verbal preverbs or 
leaving them off.

Chapter 11 titled "The grammars of Hungarian outside Hungary" by Casper de 
Groot aims at evaluating a few differences that occur between Hungarian 
spoken in Hungary (HH) and Hungarian spoken outside Hungary (HO) from a 
linguistic typological point of view as well as to examine if the changes 
in the HO varieties follow or violate linguistic universals and 
implicational hierarchies, and if co-occurrences of changes can be 
explained in terms of universals or hierarchies.

In conclusion the following can be stated: with the coverage the volume 
provides, it achieves its main goal. By giving a great deal of information 
and previously unpublished data on the linguistic situation and social and 
linguistic characteristic of the language use of minority Hungarian 
speakers, it provides an insightful overview of the general processes and 
principles that are at work in cases of Hungarian language contact.

REFERENCES

Bartha, Cs. (1993). Egy amerikai magyar közösség nyelvhasználatának 
szociolingvisztikai megközelítései [Socioliguistic approaches to the 
language use of a Hungarian American community]. Budapest: Kandidátusi 
dissertation.

Fenyvesi, A. (1995) Language contact and language death in an immigrant 
language: The case of Hungarian. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of 
Pittsburgh Working Papers in Linguistics. 3. 1-117.

Goebl, H., Nelde, P. H., Starý, Z., Wölck, W. (eds) (1996) 
Kontaktlinguistik. Contact Linguistics. Linguistique de contact. 
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Hatoss, A. (2003) Do multicultural policies work? Language maintenance and 
acculturation in two vintages of the Hungarian diaspora in Queensland, 
Australia. Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. 
Held April 30-May 3, 2003, Tempe: Arizona State University. In: Cohen, J., 
McAlister, K., Rolstad, K., and MaySwan, J. (eds.) (2004). ISB4: 
Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. 
Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Hatoss, A. (2003) Identity formation, cross-cultural attitudes and 
language maintenance in the Hungarian Diaspora of Queensland. In: L. Kerr 
(ed.) Cultural Citizenship: Challenges of Globalisation Melbourne: Deakin 
University. 71-77.

Kontra, M. (1990) Fejezetek a South Bend-i magyar nyelvhasználatból. [The 
Hungarian language as spoken in South Bend, Indiana.] Budapest: MTA 
Nyelvtudományi Intézete.

Kontra, Miklós 1999. Közérdeku nyelvészet. Budapest: Osiris

Polgár, E. (2001). Language Maintenance and Language Shift: A 
Sociolinguistic Analysis of a Hungarian-American Community. Szeged: 
University of Szeged MA Thesis. 

Rot, S. (1991) Language Contact. Frankfurt: Peter Lang GmbH. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Éva Forintos is an assistant lecturer at the University of Veszprém, 
Hungary. Her professional interests include contact linguistics, 
Australian history, culture and civilisation. She has recently handed in 
her PhD dissertation, which is the contact-linguistic investigation of one 
version of the written language of the immigrant Hungarian-Australians.





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