Hungarian Sociolinguistics in the Carpathian Basin, 1985–2022

Abstract

Until about 1985, apart from traditional dialectological research, the study of Hungarian in Hungary focused mostly on the Codified Standard Hungarian variety, whose speakers are powerful in social but not in numerical terms. Sociolinguistic research since 1985 has now resulted in a program which embraces not only the 10 million (largely monolingual) Hungarians in Hungary proper, but also the 3 million bi- or multilingual minority Hungarians in the seven neighboring countries (kin-states). This program was initiated by researchers of the Department of Sociolinguistics in the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This paper offers linguists who do not read Hungarian an overview of this research carried out between 1985 and 2022.

Keywords

• hungarians in the carpathian basin
• variationist sociolinguistics
• language contact
• language rights
• language shift
• urban dialectology