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CHAPTER 7 FINDINGS
1hey also set up a proposed ranking applicable in the Hungarian-American
bilingual immigrant community in North Carolina, which is as follows:
(FAITH, PERSPECTIVE} >> SOLIDARITY >> {FACE, POWER}?”.
The aim of my analysis is to test the applicability of Bolonyai and Bhatt’s
proposed ranking on the Hungarian-American bilingual immigrant
community in North Carolina. Bolonyai and Bhatt’s model presupposes the
existence of a community grammar, in the framework of which the socio¬
pragmatic conditions of optimality are shared. This community grammar sets
the rankings of the constraints, which govern the socio-cognitive mechanism
of code-switching. However, I claim that in the examined community, two
sociolinguistically different communities emerge, first and second generations,
which show strikingly different patterns in their Hungarian competence,
attitude to and concept of the Hungarian language as well as in their language
usage. Therefore, these two communities do not share one community
grammar, so their code-switching mechanism cannot be described applying
the same ranking of constraints within the same model of optimality.
I aim to demonstrate by pointing out significantly different patterns in first¬
and second-generation speakers’ sociolinguistic characteristics, Hungarian
competence, language use tendencies, the attitude to, and the concept of the
Hungarian language how these two sub-communities differ and why their
mechanism of code-switching cannot be governed by the same ranking of
constraints.
THE NC HUNGARIAN CLUB
We have already seen in Chapter 5 that in bilingual immigrant communities,
characteristic patterns in language usage, including code-switching, attitude
to and concept of the minority language significantly change along each
intergenerational cleft, more particularly between first- and second-generation
speakers. As the aim of this study is to test the applicability of Bolonyai and
Bhatt’s bilingual grammar on the Hungarian-American bilingual immigrant
community, it is important to describe this particular community in terms
of its sociolinguistic variables, language usage, and attitudes to languages, as
well as in terms of how these influence, if yes, the community’s code-switching
tendencies. I claim that within the examined Hungarian-American community,
more particularly, within the NC Hungarian club, two distinctively separable
sub-communities emerge on which the same community grammar cannot be
applied.
277 Bhatt — Bolonyai, Ibid., 522-546
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