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SUMMARY OF THE NC HUNGARIAN CLUB’S SOCIOLINGUISTIC CHARACTERISTICS
SUMMARY OF THE NC HUNGARIAN CLUB’S SOCIOLINGUISTIC CHARACTER¬
ISTICS
The objective of this part of the study has been to give a comprehensive
sociolinguistic characterization of the NC Hungarian Club. On the basis of
quantitative analyses, we have seen that Gl and G2 groups differ distinctively
with regard to their sociolinguistic characteristics.
The results above show striking differences in the language use patterns of
G1 and G2 speakers. Parallel to the results of previous studies, the findings
discussed above reinforce the widely made observation that the use of the
minority or heritage language markedly declines with the emergence of
the second generation”. The most considerable decline can be detected in
communication with parents, and within the peer community, with siblings??°
and Hungarian-American friends”. It can be discerned that G1 speakers, in an
immigrant setting, use the most Hungarian with their Hungarian-American
friends followed by their spouses, and they use considerably less Hungarian
with their children. G2 interlocutors use fairly little Hungarian with their
parents, siblings, and Hungarian-American friends, which shows that even
the use of Hungarian restricted to the family and to the informal domain is
gradually replaced by English (with siblings), by alternating between English
and Hungarian (with Hungarian-American friends), and by mixing English and
Hungarian (with parents). Due to the relatively young age of G2 respondents,
some language use tendencies in different domains such as communicating
with spouses, children, at work, have proven to be irrelevant.
Among the different language use tendencies, some strikingly different
patterns have been found in the G1 vs. G2 groups. In the G1 group, Hungarian
is the most prevalently used for the function of counting, and the least for the
function of talking to oneself. In the G2 group, however, English is the most
prevalent when dreaming. In the G2 group, though, Hungarian only emerges
when it comes to praying.
Examining more closely the statistically significant correlations between the
attitude to code-switching and intergenerational affiliation, it can be concluded
that G1 speakers have an overall more controversial attitude to code-switching,
which is determined by how ‘purist’ an attitude G1 respondents have towards
code-switching as well as by how extensively G1 subjects use code-switching as
a means of communicating in their participant-related language use domains.
289 Hlavac, Second-generation Speech, 17; AlSahafi — Barkhuizen, Language use in animmigrant
context, New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics, 52
290 Papapavlou — Pavlou, The interplay of language use and language maintenance, International
Journal of Applied Linguistics, 102; Hlavac, Second-generation Speech, 22; Canagarajah,
Language shift and the family, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 149
291 Papapavlou — Pavlou, The interplay of language use and language maintenance, International
Journal of Applied Linguistics, 102
+ 149 +