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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 sociolinguistic 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 sociolinguistic aspects of language shift in this particular community, Kontra has also offered a comprehensive analysis of the structural differences of HungarianAmerican 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 agreement, 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 + 82 +
