Switching in a Romanian-Hungarian bilingual context

Abstract

The paper aims to be a descriptive account of the mixed utterances produced by unbalanced simultaneous Romanian-Hungarian bilinguals. The analysis of the mixed utterances in two longitudinal corpora reveals that the great majority is represented by Romanian utterances containing one switched Hungarian word, while Hungarian utterances with a switched Romanian word are practically non-existent. This would appear to fall in with the hypothesis that switching is motivated by imperfect linguistic performance, where the weaker language seeks functional support from the stronger one. However, it is argued here that often switching is as much a matter of personal choice as necessity and a result of the two languages being simultaneously active with all bilinguals.

Keywords

• Romanian-Hungarian simultaneous bilinguals
• unbalanced bilinguals
• switching