Sustainable bilingualism and language shift - Longitudinal research in Romanian– Hungarian bilingual Kétegyháza (Hungary)
Sustainable bilingualism and language shift - Longitudinal research in Romanian– Hungarian bilingual Kétegyháza (Hungary)

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I introduce the longitudinal method in general, and more specifically, the method applied in a two-decade-long language shift research project conducted in a Romanian–Hungarian bilingual village, Kétegyháza (hereinafter LongBiLing: longitudinal study on bilingualism). I will primarily present the language choice changes occurring in the first decade (1990–2001) but I will also give a short review of the findings comparing the two decades. The aim of the project is to find out at what stage the Romanian–Hungarian language shift process is in the Hamers and Blanc’s (1989) unidimensional model of language shift and to what extent the process can be considered gradual (Mesthrie 2001). In a previous article I sought to find out in which bilingual national minority (out of the six) in Hungary sustainable bilingualism was the strongest (Borbély 2015). In this paper, I discuss language use domains (25 language choice situations) in a local community of Hungary’s Romanian national minority investigated with a longitudinal method. The aim was to learn about the differences among the linguistic domains in order to find out in which domain bilingualism was the most sustainable.

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