Hogyan lehet, hogy az Akadémiától a kocsmárosokig mindenki támogatja a magyarok magyarok általi nyelvi diszkriminációját?
How Can It Be That all Hungarians, from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to Bartenders, Support the Linguistic Discrimination of Hungarians by Hungar

Summary/Abstract: Hungarians live in what James Milroy (1999) calls standard language ideology, that is a society in which the superiority of codified standard Hungarian is maintained and recreated through various channels of communication, including public education. Other varieties of Hungarian and their speakers (both in Hungary and her neighboring countries) are badly stigmatized by the propagators of codified standard Hungarian, who include almost all Hungarians from the Academy through school teachers to bartenders and beyond. This massive language-based social discrimination is deeply rooted in Hungarian culture, which has cherished the notion of “correct Hungarian” as a guarantee for the survival of the nation since the 19th century. Data from the Hungarian National Sociolinguistic Survey conducted in 1988 show that from 50 to 90% of a representative sample of Hungarians in Hungary make judgments of grammatical correctness and use constructions in speech which are in violation of the codified standard. This means that traditional language cultivators and almost all school teachers are engaged in trying to change the speechways of about two in three Hungarians in Hungary, and more in the neighboring countries, where Hungarians speak contact dialects different from the monolingual varieties in Hungary. The author suggests three ways to change the language-based social discrimination pertaining in Hungarian speech communities: (a) the Hungarian Academy should cease supporting language mavens who spread false linguistic ideologies, (b) professional linguists should successfully popularize sound linguistic knowledge, and (c) teacher education should be reformed such that additive language pedagogy supplants the all-pervasive subtractive pedagogy (in which standard Hungarian is taught at the cost of, rather than in addition to, the pupils’ own language varieties).

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