The Use of Hungarian and Serbian in the City of Szabadka/Subotica: an Empirical Study.” Hungarian Cultural Studies
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Ferdinand, Siarl and Flora Komlosi. “The Use of Hungarian and Serbian in the City of Szabadka/Subotica: An Empirical Study.” Hungarian Cultural Studies. e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Volume 10 (2017) DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2017.278 The Use of Hungarian and Serbian in the City of Szabadka*/Subotica: An Empirical Study Siarl Ferdinand and Flora Komlosi Abstract: In this study Ferdinand and Komlosi analyze the use of Hungarian and Serbian in the city of Szabadka/Subotica, which is located in the Serbian region of Northern Vajdaság/Vojvodina. A mostly Hungarian speaking city for centuries, Szabadka/Subotica suffered the strong pro-Serbian language policy implemented by the Yugoslavian government from the end of the First World War until the dismantlement of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which gave Hungarian and other local minority languages a second chance to survive. Nowadays, Szabadka/Subotica is home to two main language groups, southern Slavic languages such a Serbian and Croatian (over sixty per cent) and Hungarian (thirty three per cent). Although Ferdinand and Komlosi employed official figures from the Serbian censuses to determine the size of each group, the situation of each language was mapped through empirical observation of language use in informal conversations, in official signage, and in permanent as well as temporary commercial signage. The results show that the role of Serbian (mostly written in Latin script) is dominant in almost all spheres of public life and as a lingua franca among various groups. Nevertheless, Hungarian maintains a strong presence in the city, especially in the center and in its northwestern districts. In this paper, Ferdinand and Komlosi aim to contribute to a better general understanding of group dynamics in bilingual settings and, specifically, to provide a clearer view of the language situation in one of the Hungarian-speaking regions lost by the historic Kingdom of Hungary after World War I. Keywords: Serbian, Hungarian, minority languages, bilingualism, language vitality Biographies: Siarl Ferdinand is a Ph.D. candidate in Bilingual Studies at University of Wales Trinity St David in Lampeter. His main research interests include topics related to minority languages and cultures from Europe and Central Asia, such as language revitalization, language maintenance, and language death. He has previously published “Situation of the Csángó Dialect of Moldavia in Romania” in this journal http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2016.231. [email protected] Flora Komlosi received an MA in Bilingualism and Multilingualism from the University of Wales Trinity St David in Carmarthen. Her main research interests include language vitality, bilingualism, acquired helplessness in language acquisition, motivation in linguistics and students’ learning style preferences. [email protected] * In this paper, the geographical names of the Autonomous Province of Vajdaság/Vojvodina are given in their Hungarian form, followed by their form in Serbian (in Latin script), both of them official in Serbia. New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press ISSN 2471-965X (online) Ferdinand, Siarl and Flora Komlosi. “The Use of Hungarian and Serbian in the City of Szabadka/Subotica: An Empirical Study.” Hungarian Cultural Studies. e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Volume 10 (2017) DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2017.278 Historical and Linguistic Introduction of the City of Szabadka/Subotica Szabadka (Hungarian) or Subotica (in Serbian and Croatian) is a city in northern Vajdaság/Vojvodina, an autonomous province of the Republic of Serbia. The region, which used to be inhabited mostly by Hungarians, formed part of the Kingdom of Hungary from the eleventh century until 1919, when it was ceded to Yugoslavia after the treaty of Trianon. Szabadka/Subotica is first mentioned in 1391 as a small town in Hungary. Nowadays it has a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants (more than 140,000 counting all its rural districts), which makes it the second most populous conurbation in Vajdaság/Vojvodina after Újvidék/Novi Sad and thus one of the main cities of Serbia. Until the cession of Vajdaság/Vojvodina to Yugoslavia, imposed upon the Kingdom of Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon, the majority of Szabadka/Subotica’s population were Hungarians (MacMillan, 2001: 269). However, since that time, the emigration of Magyars to Hungary and other countries and the arrival of thousands of Serbs and other ex-Yugoslavian nationalities into the region have changed considerably the composition of the population, as seen in Table 1 (Göncz and Vörös 2005: 192). Nevertheless, Hungarians continue to be the main ethnic group followed by three southern Slavic nationalities, namely Serbians, Croatians, and Bunjevci (see Graph 1). Year Total Hungarians Serbs Germans Other/Unknown Population Total % Total % Total % Total % 1880 62,556 31,592 50.5 2,904 4.6 1,828 2.9 26,232 42.0 1910 94,610 55,587 58.5 3,514 3.7 1,913 2.0 33,596 35.5 1931 100,058 41,401 41.4 9,200 9.2 2,865 2.9 46,592 46.5 1941 102,736 61,581 59.9 4,627 4.5 1,787 1.7 34,741 33.9 1948 112,194 51,716 46.1 11,617 10.4 480 0.4 38,381 43.1 1961 75,036 37,529 50.0 9,437 12.6 - - 28,070 37.4 1971 88,813 43,068 48.5 11,728 13.2 218 0.2 33,799 38.1 1981 100,516 44,065 43.8 13,959 13.9 97 0.1 42,395 42.2 1991 100,386 39,749 39.6 15,734 15.7 138 0.1 44,765 44.6 2011 105,681 34,511 32.7 31,558 29.9 199 0.1 39,413 37.3 Table 1: Historical distribution of the population of Szabadka/Subotica (based on Kocsis & Kocsis-Hodosi 1998: 145 and Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia 2012: 44) 40000 34511 31558 30000 20000 16740 9698 9236 10000 2728 1210 0 Hungarians Serbs Croats Bunjevci Yugoslavs Montenegrins Other or unknown Graph 1. Distribution of the population by ethnicity (Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia 2012: 44). 2 Ferdinand, Siarl and Flora Komlosi. “The Use of Hungarian and Serbian in the City of Szabadka/Subotica: An Empirical Study.” Hungarian Cultural Studies. e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Volume 10 (2017) DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2017.278 It can be said that knowledge of Serbian is universal among the inhabitants of Szabadka/Subotica. However, when the mother tongue of the people is considered, the panorama shows a multilingual city in which there are native speakers of more than fourteen languages (Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia 2012: 44-45). Since many of the local nationalities speak Serbian or other southern Slavic languages and dialects, such as Croatian, Bunjevci, Montenegrin, and Bosnian as their mother tongue, Serbian in this broader sense has become the main language. Nevertheless, about one third of the people of Szabadka/Subotica, including about ninety-four per cent of the local ethnic Hungarians and a considerable number of members of other nationalities, have Hungarian as their mother tongue (Council of Europe 2009: 6). The attraction of non-Hungarian toward the Hungarian language in Vajdasag/Vojvodina can be explained by two main reasons. The first one has its origins in the region’s history. Vajdaság/Vojvodina was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary for about a thousand years; therefore a number of families of different nationalities who had switched to Hungarian before the incorporation of Vajdaság/Vojvodina to Yugoslavia in 1919 may have maintained it as their family language. The second reason is related to personal circumstances, such as interethnic background and mixed marriages (Kocsis and Kocsis-Hodosi 1998: 147, 158). The members of the rest of minorities usually speak either their mother languages along with Serbian or Serbian only (See Graph 2). Other or unknown 11% Serbian and other Southern Slavic Hungarian languages 33% 56% Graph 2. Distribution of the population of Szabadka/Subotica according to their mother tongue (Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia 2012: 44) Language Policy and Minority Language Education in Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia The1919 treaty with the victorious Allies of World War I obligated the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as Yugoslavia was known before 1929, to protect minorities and to offer them the option of accepting their new nationality or declining and preserving their original nationality. In view of this situation and the potential danger of having a number of regions where the Yugoslavian/Serbian/Slavic sentiment was a minority, the state decided to take radical measures, the most ambitious being the transformation of education. To that end, the whole 3 Ferdinand, Siarl and Flora Komlosi. “The Use of Hungarian and Serbian in the City of Szabadka/Subotica: An Empirical Study.” Hungarian Cultural Studies. e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Volume 10 (2017) DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2017.278 population was pressured into accepting education in Serbian, the official language of the community, regardless of their ethnicity or mother tongue (Göncz and Vörös 2005: 193-194, Anderson 1991: 84). As a result, the Hungarian education system was rapidly dismantled and minority classes set up at Serbian schools. Hungarian teachers and schoolbooks were lacking and enrolment was restricted. The number of secondary schools allowed to function in minority languages was very limited, most of them in German, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak (Janjetović 2012: 71).