Linguistic Attitudes and Ideologies of the Students of the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

Abstract

The paper aims at presenting the linguistic attitudes and the underlying ideologies of the students of the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania towards their mother tongue and the Romanian language. It provides a brief summary of the most important theoretical aspects entailed (definitions and an overview of the Hungarian sociolinguistic research on linguistic attitudes and ideologies) with special regard to István Lanstyák’s classification of linguistic ideologies. The paper continues with the presentation of the University, of the population and the sample used in the research, and the distribution of the respondents by faculty, sex, age, place of origin, nationality and mother tongue. In the following chapter, the perceived Romanian competence and the attitudes of the students towards the Romanian language is discussed. The last part of the paper gives a qualitative analysis of the responses to the question Where do you think is the most beautiful Hungarian spoken?, focusing on the issues of linguistic attitudes of the students and the ideologies behind them regarding their opinions on the most beautiful variety of the Hungarian language.

Keywords

• linguistic attitudes
• linguistic ideologies
• university students
• language loyalty
• language preservation