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CHAPTER 5 BACKGROUND INFORMATION
New Brunswick analyzing second-generation Hungarian-American soldiers"
letters sent home during World War II. Her findings show that the majority of
second-generation speakers had a balanced dual ethnic identity, were perfectly
bilingual, though, preferred the use English for written communication. The
Hungarian language knowledge of the subjects showed some signs of attrition,
but it appropriately fulfilled its communicative function”.
HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES:
A HISTORY OF BILINGUAL CONTACT
The first and most numerous Hungarian wave of immigration (1.5 million
people), who came to the US in the period of 1870 and 1914 was propelled
by socioeconomic reasons.*” Mostly, people from the rural areas of Hungary
came and settled down in the traditional Hungarian communities in such as in
Ohio, New Jersey, close to big steel mills and mines where they were employed
mostly as semi- or unskilled workers’™. These early settlers came to the US to
earn some money and then to go back to Hungary”, they never really wanted
to or could integrate in the US host society”™.
As these early immigrants settled close the steel mills and mines, they were
also living in close-knit communities with their fellow workers, many of whom
were Hungarians”. In the 1930s in New Brunswick, for example, one-fifth of
the entire Hungarian-American population working in steel mills and mines
lived in a few nearby streets and constituted a very close-knit community”.
The following waves of immigration were propelled by political rather than
economic reasons, and most of the immigrants left Hungary with no intention
of returning. After the fall of the liberal democrat revolution, in the period
between 1921 and 1940, 38,541 Hungarian liberal democrats entered the
United States?”. The majority of them were highly qualified intellectuals”.
200 Tlona Kovacs, Katonalevelek — Nyelvtudas, identitastudat. Amerikai magyarok masodik
generációja az amerikai hadseregben a második világháború idején, in: Nóra Kovács, (ed.),
Tanulmányok a diaszpóráról. Budapest, Gondolat, 2005
According to Papp (1981), between 1870 and 1920, an estimated 1,078, 974 number of
Hungarians immigrated to the United States. In: Papp, Hungarian Americans and Their
Communities of Cleveland
Julianna Puskas, Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide. New York, Holmes & Meier, 2000, 119;
Anna Fenyvesi, Hungarian in the USA, Fenyvesi, Hungarian in the USA, 267
Papp, Hungarian Americans and Their Communities of Cleveland, 105; Fenyvesi, Hungarian
in the USA, 266
Kontra, Fejezetek a South Bend-i magyar nyelvhasznalatböl, 24
Papp, Hungarian Americans and Their Communities of Cleveland, 105
Kovacs, Katonalevelek, 158
Papp, Hungarian Americans and Their Communities of Cleveland, 129
Fishman, Hungarian Language Maintenance in the US, 7-8
20
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18
203
20
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207
208
s 84 ¢