Meaning-construction in everyday bilingualism. On the language attitudes of Hungarian-speaking youth in Romania

Abstract

In our presentation we will examine the diversity of linguistic attitudes of Hungarian speakers in Romania. Although there are several definitions for this concept from psychology and linguistics, linguistic attitudes are generally understood as the value judgments and attitudes that individuals form on the basis of their language socialization, language use and learning experience, in relation to languages, language varieties and language expressions. In our present research, we wanted to find out the speakers’ value judgments about the phenomenon of using Romanian and/or English loanwords in their everyday Hungarian communication. In our research paradigm we adopted a case-oriented, inductive, data-focused research towards which we applied a mixed approach: the data was collected through a questionnaire, then the focus group discussion highlighted the criteria respondents used in their value judgment, as well as their opinions about loanwords adopted from the two languages. The conversations also indirectly shed light on the way in which a minority community relates to the languages active in its linguistic environment.