Diversitatea limbii române vorbite în comunitatea românilor din Ungaria
Diversity of Romanian Language Spoken in the Indigenous Minority Community in Hungary

Summary/Abstract: Language use varies in many dimensions. Three major dimensions are the following: (1) regional: dialect variation; (2) social: sociolect or class dialect variation; (3) functional: register or functional style variation. The paper presents a concise study of the above three major dimensions of Romanian language spoken in an indigenous minority community in Hungary. The linguistic data are from the sociolinguistic fieldworks carried out in the Romanian-speaking community in Hungary. The data were collected several times between 1990 and 2004 in a number of settings and circumstances (questionnaire, conducted interview, participant observation, tests, etc.). The main conclusion of the research is, in spite of the fact that the community of Romanians living in Hungary are in the advanced stage of the process of Romanian–Hungarian language shift (see Borbély 2001), that the above three dimensions of language use variation is still available in the Romanian spoken by the older members of the studied community. The study also points out the discriminatory and elitist nature of standard languages and standardization itself, which can be an important linguistic factor that serves language shift. Summarizing, the author argues that the extension of the bounds of linguistic tolerance toward the diversity of languages will help, among other things, the maintenance of minority languages.

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