Page 82 [82]
CHAPTER 5 BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Hungarian-American immigrant communities. Ihis will be followed by a short
overview of the socioeconomic status and language use patterns prevalent
in the Hungarian-American community in North Carolina, and finally, the
Hungarian Club of North Carolina (later referred to as the NC Hungarian
Club) will be introduced.
The aim of this part is to characterize Hungarian-American communities
along their history, their socio-economic status, and from the perspective of
the collective agency in how communities organize their bilingual resources.
More precisely, how language use, with special emphasis on code-switching,
functions in these communities. The underlying concept of this part is to
show how the sociolinguistic characteristics of the Hungarian-American
immigrant communities, more particularly those of the Hungarian-American
community in North Carolina, define how these communities exploit their
bilingual resources.
Relying on these sociolinguistic characteristics, I claim that the Hungarian¬
American community is not a uniform one but is made up by two most
distinctively separable subcommunities, first- and second-generation groups.
Therefore, I claim that the community specific ranking of the socio-cognitive
constraints determining the mechanism of code-switching proposed by Bhatt
and Bolonyai'** is susceptible to the different sociolinguistic patterns emerging
in these two subcommunities.
The analysis on the Hungarian-American communities is based on the
comprehensive research of relevant literature. The respective part on the
Hungarian-American immigrant community in North Carolina relies on
Bolonyai’s (unpublished) survey conducted in 2007 as well as on US Census
Figures. For the description of the NC Hungarian Club, empirical data
are provided by participant observation, by an ample quantity of personal
interviews, as well as by sociolinguistic data deriving from questionnaires
filled out by the members of the community (see the sample questionnaire in
Appendix 2).
Prior to the analysis of the Hungarian-American bilingual communities
along the three aspects outlined above, a short overview of sociolinguistic
research on Hungarian-American immigrant communities will be presented.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH ON HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN IMMIGRANT
COMMUNITIES
The earliest comprehensive sociolinguistic research on Hungarian-American
immigrant communities analyzed Hungarian-American immigrant
% Bhatt — Bolonyai, Ibid., 522-546
* 80°