Oldal 85 [85]
OCR
SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH ON HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES been subject to externally induced changes, such as interference, transfer, convergence as well as to internally induced changes, such as analogical leveling, overgeneralization, and category switch. Although internally and externally induced changes influence the speech of both first- and secondgeneration speakers, in the former group’s language use lexical changes are predominant, while the internally induced ones are more typical of secondgeneration speakers. The permanent influence of the analytical English language strengthens the analytical attributes (the tendency to replace suffixes with analytic or periphrastic constructions or the overwhelming use of Hungarian personal pronouns) of the agglutinative Hungarian. This process of attrition emerging with the second-generation gradually results in complete language loss. Fenyvesi conducted research (20 interviews, 13 hours of recordings) on the linguistic changes that Hungarian spoken by a Hungarian-American immigrant community (in McKeesport, Pennsylvania) undergoes in a language contact situation in 1993'°8. Her study is a comprehensive analysis of the structural changes that Hungarian as an agglutinative language undergoes due to English interference, changes induced by the language contact situation, as well as to the natural simplification tendencies of the Hungarian language, that is, internally induced language changes. The contact-induced linguistic interference tendencies emerging in the Hungarian-American language in McKeesport have been demonstrated on the levels of phonology, (e.g. the presence of aspiration, the lengthening of stressed short vowels, etc.), morphology (e.g. disharmonic inflections, replacement of pre-verb constructions, the loss of the case marking system, etc.), syntax (e.g. presence of overt personal pronouns, lack of agreement between subject and verb, the overt use of the passive, etc.), lexicon (e.g. borrowings, the address system, code-switching, etc.). Going along the same theoretical line, Fenyvesi in her study on the language use characteristics of the Hungarian-American language in Toledo has focused on the different linguistic tendencies emerging in this community other than in standard Hungarian-Hungarian. She has concluded that the most noticeable differences are word order, the use of redundant personal pronouns, analytical structures, the overt use of past participles with a passive meaning, the loss of the possessive marking, singular and plural forms of nouns, and lack of agreements". Kovács conducted research on the expression of dual Hungarian-American identities, and the written language skills of second-generation speakers of 8 Anna Fenyvesi, Language contact and language death in an immigrant language: The case of Hungarian, Working Papers in Linguistics, 3, Fall: 1-117 (1995), University of Pittsburgh 19 Anna Fenyvesi, Hungarian in the USA, in: Anna Fenyvesi (ed.), Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary. Studies on Hungarian as a Minority Language, Amsterdam / Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005, 265-318 + 83 +
