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CHAPTER 5 BACKGROUND INFORMATION
settings. She also points out that the Hungarian Scout Organization has been
the most successful in preserving the Hungarian language and culture for the
second-generations.
Kontras work examined a traditional Hungarian ethnic community, South
Bend, in Indiana in the period of 1978-1981 from the perspective of socio¬
linguistic and structural language use tendencies (40 interviews, 80 hours of
Hungarian recordings)". He has shown that in that particular community
in the 1980s, the process of language shift or assimilation was taking place at
an accelerating rate. In the 1980s, of the three traditional Hungarian ethnic
organizations — the churches, political, and social clubs — only the churches
functioned. The Hungarian Catholic Church was the only one that offered
Hungarian-language masses every Sunday. Family remained the main domain
where the use of Hungarian still prevailed, but reciprocal communication was
common, that is, the children rarely responded to their parents’ Hungarian in
Hungarian, but rather in English. In addition to describing the sociolinguis¬
tic aspects of language shift in this particular community, Kontra has also
offered a comprehensive analysis of the structural differences of Hungarian¬
American language use as compared to standard Hungarian. He has classified
these structural changes in terms of phonology (aspiration, long vowels, the
retroflex r sound, vowel harmonization, diphthongs, etc.), morphology (the
lack of harmonization of —val, -vel suffixes, the replacement of the inessive
case ending with superessive, etc.), semantics (word order, numerical agree¬
ment, redundant pronouns, syntactic calques, etc.), vocabulary (borrowings,
code-switching, intralingual deviations, interlingual deviations, hybrid words,
etc.), personal names (orthography, spelling, last names, first names, middle
names, etc), and in terms of communicational interferences (tu/vois forms,
szokott plus infinitive).
Bartha conducted research on the social and linguistic characteristics of the
Hungarian community in Detroit (Delray), Ohio, in 1987 (15 sociolinguistic
interviews, 20 hours of recordings), and she published some of her results in
1995-1996"*”. She claims that a shifting importance of the Hungarian language
to the English one as well as more evident signs of Hungarian language attrition
can already be seen with the emergence of second-generation speakers. The
process of attrition runs parallel with the functional reduction of Hungarian
— second-generation speakers use no Hungarian in the most important
public domain, that is, the workplace. Furthermore, as second-generation
speakers learn Hungarian as a second language, in an English-speaking,
environment, they acquire a modified Hungarian language system that has
6 Miklés Kontra, Fejezetek a South Bend-i magyar nyelvhaszndlatbol, Budapest, MTA
Nyelvtudományi Intézete, 1990
17 Csilla Bartha, Social and linguistic characteristics of immigrant language shift: The case of
Hungarian in Detroit, Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 43 (3-4) (1995-1996), 405-431
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