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CHAPTER 6 —o — METHOD DATA COLLECTION The data presented in this paper were collected via semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews conducted by the author and Ágnes Bolonyai in the Hungarian community of North Carolina in the course of 2007 and 2008. In the course of the ‘semi-structured’ interviews, which were informal dinner conversations at the home of Agnes Bolonyai, there were narrative elicitation types of questions about the experience of being AmericanHungarian in North Carolina. Such sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with 39 Hungarian-Americans. The interviewed subjects are either members of the North Carolina Hungarian Club or are closely affiliated to it. In the interviews, subjects took part individually, or together with their close family members, with their spouses or children. That is why altogether 28 interviews were conducted. The minimum time length of the interviews was 45 minutes, but the longest interview lasted 4 hours. Prior to the interviews, all subjects were informed that the interviews would be recorded, and they all gave their consent to it. Altogether, the whole sample consists of 54 hours of recorded sociolinguistic interviews. The conversations were transcribed to provide a text of 2,174 pages (12-point Times New Roman, double-spaced). Because of limitation of scope and length, my analysis mainly focuses on the interview data. However, the empirical observations I made during conducting the interviews as well as participating in the Hungarian Club’s and other Hungarian events helped me gain a better understanding of the Club’s group dynamics and its members’ collective speech patterns. In addition to the oral interviews, participants were asked to fill out a twopage questionnaire which contained survey types of questions inquiring about their sociolinguistic background such as age, qualification, profession, time spent since the date of immigration as well as about their Hungarian/English e 113"
