The Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary

This study describes the sociolinguistic situation of the indigenous Hungarian national minorities in Slovakia (c. 600,000), Ukraine (c. 180,000), Romania (c. 2,000,000), Yugoslavia (c. 300,000), Slovenia (c. 8,000) and Austria (c. 6,000). Following the guidelines of Hans Goebl et al, the historical sociolinguistic portrait of each minority is presented from 1920 through to the mid-1990s. Each country's report includes sections on geography and demography, history, politics, economy, culture and religion, language policy and planning, and language use (domains of minority and/or majority language use, proficiency, attitudes, etc.). The team's findings were presented in the form of 374 pages of manuscripts, articles and tables, written in Hungarian and English. The core of the team's research results lies in the results of an empirical survey designed to study the social characteristics of Hungarian-minority bilingualism in the six project countries, and the linguistic similarities and differences between the six contact varieties of Hungarian and Hungarian in Hungary. The respondents were divided by age, education, and settlement group - city vs. village and local majority vs. local minority. The first thing to be observed is that Hungarian is tending to be spoken less to children than to parents and grandparents, a familiar pattern of language shift. In contact varieties of Hungarian, analytic constructions may be used where monolingual Hungarians would use a more synthetic form. Mr Kontra gives as an example the compound tagdij, which in Standard Hungarian means "membership fee" but which is replaced in contact Hungarian by the two-word phrase tagsagi dij. Another similar example concerns the synthetic verb hegedult "played the violin" and the analytic expression hegedun jatszott. The contrast is especially striking between the Hungarians in the northern Slavic countries, who use the synthetic form frequently, and those in the southern Slavic countries, who mainly use the analytic form. Mr. Kontra notes that from a structural point of view, there is no immediate explanation for this, since Slovak or Ukrainian are as likely to cause interference as is Serbian. He postulates instead that the difference may be attributable to some sociohistoric cause, and points out that the Turkish occupation of what is today Voivodina caused a discontinuity of the Hungarian presence in the region, with the result that Hungarians were resettled in the area only two and a half centuries ago. However, the Hungarians in today's Slovakia and Ukraine have lived together with Slavic peoples continuously for over a millennium. It may be, he suggests, that 250 years of interethnic coexistence is less than is needed for such a contact-induced change to run its course. Next Mr. Kontra moved on to what he terms "mental maps and morphology". In Hungarian, the names of cities and villages take the surface case (eg. Budapest-en "in Budapest") whereas some names denoting Hungarian settlements and all names of foreign cities take the interior case (eg. Tihany-ban "in Tihany" and Boston-ban "in Boston). The role of the semantic feature "foreign" in suffix-choice can be illustrated by such minimal pairs as Velence-n "in Velence, a village in Hungary" versus Velence-ben "in Velence [=Venice], a city in Italy", and Pecs-en "in Pecs, a city in Hungary" vs. Becs-ben "in Becs, ie. Vienna". This Hungarian vs. foreign distinction is often interpreted as "belonging to historical (pre-1920) Hungary" vs. "outside historical Hungary". The distinction is also expressed in the dichotomy "home" vs. "abroad'. The 1920 border changes have had an impact on both majority and minority Hungarians' mental maps, the maps which govern the choice of surface vs. interior cases with placenames. As there is a growing divergence between the mental maps of majority and minority Hungarians, so there will be a growing divergence in their use of the placename suffixes. Two placenames were chosen to scratch the surface of this complex problem: Craiova (a city in Oltenia, Romania) and Kosovo (Hungarian Koszovo) an autonomous region in southeast Yugoslavia. The assumption to be tested was that both placenames would be used with the inessive (interior) suffixes categorically by Hungarians in Hungary, but that the superessive suffix (showing "home") would be used near-categorically by Hungarians in Romania and Yugoslavia (Voivodina). Minority Hungarians in countries other than Romania and Yugoslavia would show no difference from majority Hungarians in Hungary. In fact, the data show that, contrary to expectation, there is considerable variation within Hungary. And although Koszovo is used, as expected, with the "home" suffix by 61% of the informants in Yugoslavia, the same suffix is used by an even higher percentage of the subjects in Slovenia. Mr. Kontra's team suggests that one factor playing a role in this might be the continuance of the former Yugoslav mentality in the Hungarians of Slovenia, at least from the geographical point of view. The contact varieties of Hungarian show important grammatical differences from Hungarian in Hungary. One of these concerns the variable use of Null subjects (the inclusion or exclusion of the subject of the verb). When informants were asked to insert either megkertem or megkertem ot - "I asked her" - into a test sentence, 54.9% of the respondents in the Ukraine inserted the second phrase as opposed to only 27.4% in Hungary. Although Mr. Kontra and his team concentrated more on the differences between Contact Hungarian and Standard Hungarian, they also discovered a number of similarities. One such similarity is demonstrable in the distribution of what Mr. Kontra calls an ongoing syntactic merger in Hungarian in Hungary. This change means effectively that two possibilities merge to form a third. For instance, the two sentences Valoszinuleg kulfoldre fognak koltozni and Valoszinu, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni merge to form the new construction Valszinuleg, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni ("Probably they will move abroad."). When asked to choose "the most natural" of the sentences, one in four chose the new construction, and a chi-square test shows homogeneity in the sample. In other words, this syntactic change is spreading across the entire Hungarian-speaking region in the Carpathian Basin Mr. Kontra believes that politicians, educators, and other interested parties now have reliable and up-to-date information about each Hungarian minority. An awareness of Hungarian as a pluricentric language is being developed which elevates the status of contact varieties of Hungarian used by the minorities, an essential process, he believes, if minority languages are to be maintained.

The Ideology, Politics and Autonomous Art of Richard Weiner: (An Event in Discourse)"

The first aim of the project was to compile documentation on the life and work of Richard Weiner, a Czech journalist, writer and poet who spent the best part of his life as Paris correspondent for Lidove noviny. Langerova looked at the contexts and the growing independence of certain parts of his work, the distribution of thematic compositional elements into different parts of discourse and their position in the autonomous space of a work of art. Looking at the features of minority literature and the contemporary contexts of Weiner's life and work Langerova focuses on the situation of the Jewish community (Wiener came from an assimilated Jewish family). For this minorities, the function of language as a medium of communication which is able to create an autonomous world became increasingly important. Literature, which is based on this function of language, is a political matter par excellence before it begins forming as an autonomous, independent and divergent place. This means that everything private and intimate is closely connected to political and social responsibility, while supposedly objective genres contain subjective features. Another important characteristic is "nomadism", which asks the question of "Where do I belong". This was very important in Czechoslovakia after World War I , as in the issue of Zionism. Although Weiner rejected Zionism, he asks this question in his writing and it is reflected at a symbolic level in his work, which shows a fundamental thematic and compositional plan of a journey, cross-roads and wandering. These theses were reflected in Weiner's life, which was a series of continuous transfers and unplanned moves, often when he thought he had found his place. As well as tracing the course of his life, and his relations with and views of other writers, Langerova looks at his writings in various areas. Her major focus is the divergence of trivial and great events into different types of discourse in Richard Weiner's work, their transfer (small into great, trivial into mythical) and their historical context.

Phonetic Aspects of Speech Communication

Nadeina set out to develop methods of speech development in Russian as a mother tongue, focusing on improving diction, training in voice quality control, intonation control, the removal of dialect, and speech etiquette. She began with training in the receptive skills of language, i.e. reading and listening, since the interpretation of someone else's language plays an important role in language production. Her studies of students' reading speed of students showed that it varies between 40 and 120 words per minute, which is normally considered very slow. She discovered a strong correlation between speed of reading and speaking skills: the slower a person reads the worse is their ability to speak and has designed exercises to improve reading skills. Nadeina also believes that listening to other people's speech is very important, both to analyse its content and in some cases as an example, so listening skills need to be developed. Many people have poor pronunciation habits acquired as children. On the basis of speech samples from young Russians (male and female, aged 17-22), Nadeina analysed the commonest speech faults - nasalisation, hesitation and hemming at the end of sense-groups, etc. Using a group of twenty listeners, she looked for a correlation between how voice quality is perceived and certain voice quality parameters, e.g. pitch range, tremulousness, fluency, whispering, harshness, sonority, tension and audible breath. She found that the less non-linguistic segment variations in speech appeared, the more attractive the speech was rated. The results are included in a textbook aimed at helping people to improve their oral skills and to communicate ideas to an audience. She believes this will assist Russian officials in their attempts to communicate their ideas to different social spheres, and also foreigners learning Russian.

Language, Thought, Relativism, Nationalism: An Interdisciplinary Study

Ms. Neumer and her team began their project with a critical analysis of the various theories of the relationship between language and thought. Their aim was to develop a theoretical position concerning the issue of universalism versus relativism. This issue is closely bound up with one of the main questions of the history of East and Central Europe, namely, the question of the nation, and the possibility of mutual understanding between national cultures. The team attempted to avoid falling into an all-too-common trap, that of allowing a political perspective to obscure the central theoretical issues. In a project whose outcome totalled over 1000 pages of manuscript in German, English and Hungarian, they touched on cognitive psychological, linguistic, semiotic, socio-semiotic, and other such themes. Their experience has convinced them of the fruitful heuristic possibilities of the interaction of scientific and philosophical approaches in this area of research. A preliminary analysis of the history of philosophy and inquiries into conceptual fields revealed that, in order to reach strong relativist conclusions concerning the unity of thought and language, it is required to take as a point of departure the widest possible sense of these concepts. But in fact, such an option ends up refuting itself: pursuing the premises to their final conclusion one arrives at the restriction of relativism. The team outlined a theory of the understanding of the Other which, borrowing from analytical as well as continental-hermeneutic trends, does not underestimate, on the one hand, the difficulties of understanding between various forms of life, cultures, and languages, but, on the other hand, can provide an alternative solution to the theory of incommensurabiltiy. Within the boundary of this problematic the team studied the problems of translatability, the acquisition of the mother and foreign languages, and natural or cultural determinacy of kind terms. The team regards its most original contribution to be the association of the problem of relativism-universalism and the language-thought relation with contemporary investigations into the question of orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Their conclusion was that, although certain connections can be revealed both between forms of communication and the thesis of the unity of language and thought, and between periods in the history of communication and the predominance of relativistic or universalistic tendencies, forms of communication do not unequivocally determine the answers to these questions.

Standard Language in Bosna and Hercegovina - in Language Policy Documents

From the beginning of the standardisation of language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. from the acceptance of Karadzic's phonetic spelling in the mid-19th century, to the present day when there are three different language standards in force - Bosniac (Muslim), Croatian and Serbian, language in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been a subject of political conflict. Documents on language policy from this period show the degree to which domestic and foreign political factors influenced the standard language issue, beginning with the very appellation for the specific norm regulation. The material analysed (proclamations by political, cultural and other organisations as well as corresponding constitutional and statutory provisions on language use) shows the differing treatment of the standard language in Bosnia and Herzegovina in different historical periods. During the period of Turkish rule (until 1878) there was no real political interest in the issue. Under Austro-Hungarian rule (1878-1918) there was an attempt to use the language as a means of forming a united Bosnian nation, but this was later abandoned. During the first Yugoslavia (1918-1941) a uniform solution was imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina, as throughout the Serbo-Croatian language area, while under the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), the official language of Bosnia and Herzegovina was Croatian. The period from 1945 to 1991 had two phases: the first a standard language unity of Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Montenegrins (until 1965), and the second a gradual but stormy separation of national languages, which has been largely completed since 1991. The introductory study includes a detailed analysis of all the expressions used, with special reference to the present state, and accompanies the collection of documents which represent the main outcome of the research.

Strengthening of laterality of verbal and visuospatial functions during childhood and adolescence

Cognitive functions in the child's brain develop in the context of complex adaptive processes, determined by genetic and environmental factors. Little is known about the cerebral representation of cognitive functions during development. In particular, knowledge about the development of right hemispheric (RH) functions is scarce. Considering the dynamics of brain development, localization and lateralization of cognitive functions must be expected to change with age. Twenty healthy subjects (8.6-20.5 years) were examined with fMRI and neuropsychological tests. All participants completed two fMRI tasks known to activate left hemispheric (LH) regions (language tasks) and two tasks known to involve predominantly RH areas (visual search tasks). A laterality index (LI) was computed to determine the asymmetry of activation. Group analysis revealed unilateral activation of the LH language circuitry during language tasks while visual search tasks induced a more widespread RH activation pattern in frontal, superior temporal, and occipital areas. Laterality of language increased between the ages of 8-20 in frontal (r = 0.392, P = 0.049) and temporal (r = 0.387, P = 0.051) areas. The asymmetry of visual search functions increased in frontal (r = -0.525, P = 0.009) and parietal (r = -0.439, P = 0.027) regions. A positive correlation was found between Verbal-IQ and the LI during a language task (r = 0.585, P = 0.028), while visuospatial skills correlated with LIs of visual search (r = -0.621, P = 0.018). To summarize, cognitive development is accompanied by changes in the functional representation of neuronal circuitries, with a strengthening of lateralization not only for LH but also for RH functions. Our data show that age and performance, independently, account for the increases of laterality with age.

International teachers in the American classroom : deposing the myth of monolingualism

An international graduate teaching assistant‘s way of speaking may pose a challenge for college students enrolled in STEM courses at American universities. Students commonly complain that unfamiliar accents interfere with their ability to comprehend the IGTA or that they have difficulty making sense of the IGTA‘s use of words or phrasing. These frustrations are echoed by parents who pay tuition bills. The issue has provoked state and national legislative debates over universities‘ use of IGTAs. However, potentially productive debates and interventions have been stalemated due to the failure to confront deeply embedded myths and cultural models that devalue otherness and privilege dominant peoples, processes, and knowledge. My research implements a method of inquiry designed to identify and challenge these cultural frameworks in order to create an ideological/cultural context that will facilitate rather than impede the valuable efforts that are already in place. Discourse theorist Paul Gee‘s concepts of master myth, cultural models, and meta-knowledge offer analytical tools that I have adapted in a unique research approach emphasizing triangulation of both analytic methods and data sites. I examine debates over IGTA‘s use of language in the classroom among policy-makers, parents of college students, and scholars and teachers. First, the article "Teach Impediment" provides a particularly lucid account of the public debate over IGTAs. My analysis evidences the cultural hold of the master myth of monolingualism in public policy-making. Second, Michigan Technological University‘s email listserve Parentnet is analyzed to identify cultural models supporting monolingualism implicit in everyday conversation. Third, a Chronicle of Higher Education colloquy forum is analyzed to explore whether scholars and teachers who draw on communication and linguistic research overcome the ideological biases identified in earlier chapters. My analysis indicates that a persistent ideological bias plays out in these data sites, despite explicit claims by invested speakers to the contrary. This bias is a key reason why monolingualism remains so tenaciously a part of educational practice. Because irrational expectations and derogatory assumptions have gone unchallenged, little progress has been made despite decades of earnest work and good intentions. Therefore, my recommendations focus on what we say not what we intend.

Language Boxes: Bending the Host Language with Modular Language Changes

As domain-specific modeling begins to attract widespread acceptance, pressure is increasing for the development of new domain-specific languages. Unfortunately these DSLs typically conflict with the grammar of the host language, making it difficult to compose hybrid code except at the level of strings; few mechanisms (if any) exist to control the scope of usage of multiple DSLs; and, most seriously, existing host language tools are typically unaware of the DSL extensions, thus hampering the development process. Language boxes address these issues by offering a simple, modular mechanism to encapsulate (i) compositional changes to the host language, (ii) transformations to address various concerns such as compilation and highlighting, and (iii) scoping rules to control visibility of language extensions. We describe the design and implementation of language boxes, and show with the help of several examples how modular extensions can be introduced to a host language and environment.

Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy: Europe and the Politics of Emulation

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed a style of philosophy that was directed against certain pictures [bild] that tacitly direct our language and forms of life. His aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle and to fight against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115). In this context Wittgenstein is talking of philosophical pictures, deep metaphors that have structured our language but he does also use the term picture in other contexts (see Owen 2003, 83). I want to appeal to Wittgenstein in my use of the term ideology to refer to the way in which powerful underlying metaphors in neoclassical economics have a strong rhetorical and constitutive force at the level of public policy. Indeed, I am specifically speaking of the notion of ‘the performative’ in Wittgenstein and Austin. The notion of the knowledge economy has a prehistory in Hayek (1937; 1945) who founded the economics of knowledge in the 1930s, in Machlup (1962; 1970), who mapped the emerging employment shift to the US service economy in the early 1960s, and to sociologists Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974) who began to tease out the consequences of these changes for social structure in the post-industrial society in the early 1970s. The term has been taken up since by economists, sociologists, futurists and policy experts recently to explain the transition to the so-called ‘new economy’. It is not just a matter of noting these discursive strands in the genealogy of the ‘knowledge economy’ and related or cognate terms. We can also make a number of observations on the basis of this brief analysis. First, there has been a succession of terms like ‘postindustrial economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning economy’, each with a set of related concepts emphasising its social, political, management or educational aspects. Often these literatures are not cross-threading and tend to focus on only one aspect of phenomena leading to classic dichotomies such as that between economy and society, knowledge and information. Second, these terms and their family concepts are discursive, historical and ideological products in the sense that they create their own meanings and often lead to constitutive effects at the level of policy. Third, while there is some empirical evidence to support claims concerning these terms, at the level of public policy these claims are empirically underdetermined and contain an integrating, visionary or futures component, which necessarily remains untested and is, perhaps, in principle untestable.

Semiotic Analysis in the Study of Social Work

Research and professional practices have the joint aim of re-structuring the preconceived notions of reality. They both want to gain the understanding about social reality. Social workers use their professional competence in order to grasp the reality of their clients, while researchers’ pursuit is to open the secrecies of the research material. Development and research are now so intertwined and inherent in almost all professional practices that making distinctions between practising, developing and researching has become difficult and in many aspects irrelevant. Moving towards research-based practices is possible and it is easily applied within the framework of the qualitative research approach (Dominelli 2005, 235; Humphries 2005, 280). Social work can be understood as acts and speech acts crisscrossing between social workers and clients. When trying to catch the verbal and non-verbal hints of each others’ behaviour, the actors have to do a lot of interpretations in a more or less uncertain mental landscape. Our point of departure is the idea that the study of social work practices requires tools which effectively reveal the internal complexity of social work (see, for example, Adams & Dominelli & Payne 2005, 294 – 295). The boom of qualitative research methodologies in recent decades is associated with much profound the rupture in humanities, which is called the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). The idea that language is not transparently mediating our perceptions and thoughts about reality, but on the contrary it constitutes it was new and even confusing to many social scientists. Nowadays we have got used to read research reports which have applied different branches of discursive analyses or narratologic or semiotic approaches. Although differences are sophisticated between those orientations they share the idea of the predominance of language. Despite the lively research work of today’s social work and the research-minded atmosphere of social work practice, semiotics has rarely applied in social work research. However, social work as a communicative practice concerns symbols, metaphors and all kinds of the representative structures of language. Those items are at the core of semiotics, the science of signs, and the science which examines people using signs in their mutual interaction and their endeavours to make the sense of the world they live in, their semiosis. When thinking of the practice of social work and doing the research of it, a number of interpretational levels ought to be passed before reaching the research phase in social work. First of all, social workers have to interpret their clients’ situations, which will be recorded in the files. In some very rare cases those past situations will be reflected in discussions or perhaps interviews or put under the scrutiny of some researcher in the future. Each and every new observation adds its own flavour to the mixture of meanings. Social workers have combined their observations with previous experience and professional knowledge, furthermore, the situation on hand also influences the reactions. In addition, the interpretations made by social workers over the course of their daily working routines are never limited to being part of the personal process of the social worker, but are also always inherently cultural. The work aiming at social change is defined by the presence of an initial situation, a specific goal, and the means and ways of achieving it, which are – or which should be – agreed upon by the social worker and the client in situation which is unique and at the same time socially-driven. Because of the inherent plot-based nature of social work, the practices related to it can be analysed as stories (see Dominelli 2005, 234), given, of course, that they are signifying and told by someone. The research of the practices is concentrating on impressions, perceptions, judgements, accounts, documents etc. All these multifarious elements can be scrutinized as textual corpora, but not whatever textual material. In semiotic analysis, the material studied is characterised as verbal or textual and loaded with meanings. We present a contribution of research methodology, semiotic analysis, which has to our mind at least implicitly references to the social work practices. Our examples of semiotic interpretation have been picked up from our dissertations (Laine 2005; Saurama 2002). The data are official documents from the archives of a child welfare agency and transcriptions of the interviews of shelter employees. These data can be defined as stories told by the social workers of what they have seen and felt. The official documents present only fragmentations and they are often written in passive form. (Saurama 2002, 70.) The interviews carried out in the shelters can be described as stories where the narrators are more familiar and known. The material is characterised by the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. The levels of the story and the telling of the story become apparent when interviews or documents are examined with the use of semiotic tools. The roots of semiotic interpretation can be found in three different branches; the American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics in Paris and the so called formalism in Moscow and Tartu; however in this paper we are engaged with the so called Parisian School of semiology which prominent figure was A. J. Greimas. The Finnish sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Jukka Törrönen (1997a; 1997b) have further developed the ideas of Greimas in their studies on socio-semiotics, and we lean on their ideas. In semiotics social reality is conceived as a relationship between subjects, observations, and interpretations and it is seen mediated by natural language which is the most common sign system among human beings (Mounin 1985; de Saussure 2006; Sebeok 1986). Signification is an act of associating an abstract context (signified) to some physical instrument (signifier). These two elements together form the basic concept, the “sign”, which never constitutes any kind of meaning alone. The meaning will be comprised in a distinction process where signs are being related to other signs. In this chain of signs, the meaning becomes diverged from reality. (Greimas 1980, 28; Potter 1996, 70; de Saussure 2006, 46-48.) One interpretative tool is to think of speech as a surface under which deep structures – i.e. values and norms – exist (Greimas & Courtes 1982; Greimas 1987). To our mind semiotics is very much about playing with two different levels of text: the syntagmatic surface which is more or less faithful to the grammar, and the paradigmatic, semantic structure of values and norms hidden in the deeper meanings of interpretations. Semiotic analysis deals precisely with the level of meaning which exists under the surface, but the only way to reach those meanings is through the textual level, the written or spoken text. That is why the tools are needed. In our studies, we have used the semiotic square and the actant analysis. The former is based on the distinctions and the categorisations of meanings, and the latter on opening the plotting of narratives in order to reach the value structures.

The Benefits of Multilingualism for Statutory and Constitutional Interpretation in South Africa

Taking the South African experience as an example, this article considers the interpretive benefits to be reaped from having access to bi- and multilingual versions of a statutory text. The discussion takes place against the backdrop of a history of statutory bi- and multilingualism in the said jurisdiction as well as, at present, constitutional guarantees of language rights and the “parity of esteem” of eleven official languages. It is argued that, if invoked with due discretion and in a non-rigid way, statutory multilingualism can be a boon to statutory and constitutional interpretation. The South African courts – whose traditional approach to statutory inter-pretation has tended to be literalist, formalistic and formulaic – are, generally speaking, to be commended for their supple use of bilingualism as an aid to interpretation over the years. The advent of constitutional multilingualism and the (potential) availability of statutory texts (and the Constitution) in more than two languages, have moreover created conditions conducive to the further development and refinement of reliance on multilingualism in statutory and constitutional interpretation – certain challenges notwithstanding.