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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 HungarianAmerican 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 The respective part on the Hungarian-American immigrant community in North Carolina relies on Bolonyai’s (unpublished) survey conducted in 2007 as well as on US Census Figures.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°
