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English Applied Linguistics Phd Program University of Szeged Graduate School in Linguistics English Applied Linguistics PhD Program Language policies and language ideologies related to multilingualism: A case study of the Hungarian minority population in Szeklerland PhD dissertation Zsuzsanna Éva Kiss Supervisor: Prof. Miklós Kontra Szeged 2012 Language policies and language ideologies related to multilingualism: A case study of the Hungarian minority population in Szeklerland Table of contents Chapter 1. Introduction: The aim of the research ....................................................... 6 Chapter 2. Sociolinguistic background ......................................................................... 9 2.1. Historical background ...................................................................................................................... 9 2.2. Language policy: Language as a right, as a resource or as a problem.......................................... 10 2.2.1. Romanian ................................................................................................................................ 10 2.2.2. Hungarian ................................................................................................................................ 18 2.2.3. Foreign language learning ....................................................................................................... 25 2.3. Language ideologies ....................................................................................................................... 28 Chapter 3. Theoretical framework .............................................................................. 30 3.1. Language policy and planning ....................................................................................................... 30 3.2. Language ideologies ....................................................................................................................... 38 3.3. Combining language policies and language ideologies ................................................................. 43 Chapter 4. Methodology ............................................................................................... 45 4.1. Research questions ......................................................................................................................... 45 4.2. Type of research: Case study .......................................................................................................... 45 4.3. Place of data collection .................................................................................................................. 47 4.3.1. Demographic, educational, linguistic and geographic background ......................................... 47 4.3.2. School profile .......................................................................................................................... 49 4.4. Data collection................................................................................................................................ 51 4.5. Participants .................................................................................................................................... 53 4.6. Data analysis: Thematic content analysis ...................................................................................... 56 4.7. Language policy and language ideologies evaluation .................................................................... 58 4.8. My position as a researcher ............................................................................................................ 59 Chapter 5. Results ......................................................................................................... 65 5.1. Multilingualism ............................................................................................................................... 65 5.2. The Romanian language ................................................................................................................. 73 5.2.1. Language policy ...................................................................................................................... 73 5.2.2. The ideology of territoriality: Is Szeklerland different from the rest of Romania? ................. 86 5.2.3. Learning Romanian: A territory-imposed obligation?............................................................. 95 5.2.4. Further ideologies related to learning Romanian ................................................................... 102 5.2.5. Terminological disagreement: the Romanian as a “foreign” language ideology ................... 105 5.3. The English language: the “English at every step” policy is “not enough” ................................ 109 5.4. Hungarian ..................................................................................................................................... 116 Chapter 6. Discussion ................................................................................................. 125 6.1. Language ideologies ..................................................................................................................... 125 6.2. Language policy............................................................................................................................ 128 6.3. Language policy and language ideologies.................................................................................... 133 Chapter 7. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 138 Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 143 References .................................................................................................................... 169 Notes ............................................................................................................................. 184 Acknowledgements: The manuscript has gained very much from the advice and suggestions of a number of people, in particular my supervisor, Miklós Kontra. Without his expertise in both the linguistic and historico-political situation of Hungarians in Romania, his reading instructions and factual guidance, this dissertation would never have been completed. I would also like to express my gratitude to Anna Fenyvesi, whose patience, encouragement and innumerable linguistic corrections have significantly helped this dissertation come into existence. I am in debt to the LINEE Project for the four year scholarship during and after my PhD studies at the University of Szeged (Hungary) and the financial support I have benefited from while participating at a number of workshops, fieldwork trips, summer schools and conferences all around Europe. For the most part, the writing of this dissertation has taken place in the staff room of my workplace, the János Karácsonyi Catholic Grammar School in Gyula, Hungary. I would like to thank the school‟s principal, Zoltán Petrócki, and my colleagues for their support and pleasant working environment they offered throughout the long afternoon hours I spent at school. Also, I am grateful to all the teachers, school principals, students, educational representatives and parents in Szeklerland who agreed to participate as subjects for the LINEE Project and actively helped me in carrying out my fieldwork. Last but not least, thank you for the pre-examiners, Attila Benő and Anna Borbély for their proposed corrections. Keywords: language policy, language ideologies, multilingualism, Szeklerland. Abstract This dissertation aims to investigate the educational language policies of minority Hungarian educational settings in Szeklerland and to trace aspects of language ideologies connected to these language policies in terms of multilingualism as conceived of by students, parents, teachers, school presidents and educational officials (Throop, 2007). The characteristics of multilingualism are explored with explicit focus on the Hungarian, Romanian and English language. The dissertation combines the theoretical framework of language policy and language ideologies as proposed by Spolsky (2004, 2007) and Shohamy (2006a), who conceive of the aforementioned linguistic fields to be interconnected to each other. Chapter 1. Introduction: The aim of the research In the present dissertation I aim to look at the language policies and language ideologies related to multilingualism in the educational context of the Hungarian minority population in Szeklerland. The motivation for the choice of the topic can be briefly summarized as follows. In recent decades it has become commonplace in European bilingual contexts to have more than two languages in the school curriculum and studies carried out to explore the characteristics of multilingual education are becoming more and more widespread. However, the number of research studies exploring multilingualism within the combined theoretical framework of language policies and language ideologies is still insignificant. The number of studies which aim to explore the phenomenon of multilingualism in Szeklerland, Romania, in the educational context of the Hungarian minority is even smaller. For instance, Kontra (1995: 20) argues that due to the fact that under communism it was taboo to speak about the issues of multilingualism, of ethnic identity and linguistic human rights in East-Central Europe, scholarly research on these problems was only being started in the middle of the 1990‟s. In addition, Kontra (2009: 93)
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