Hungarian-American Attitudes to Language Maintenance and Bilingual Education in the United States

Czeglédi, Sándor (2025) Hungarian-American Attitudes to Language Maintenance and Bilingual Education in the United States. HUNGARIAN JOURNAL OF MINORITY STUDIES, 8. pp. 7-27. ISSN 2560-080X

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Abstract

The paper attempts to map the potentially shifting attitudes and opinions of the representatives of Hungarian-American communities in the United States regarding the issue of first language maintenance and bilingual education. Relying on Graedler’s observation that newspapers play a substantial role “in the expression and mediation of a society’s language attitudes,” the present analysis focuses on the digitized versions of the printed newspapers and magazines published in the Hungarian language in the United States (available via Arcanum Digitheca) in order to chart the diachronic language ideological changes toward minority-language maintenance in the context of Hungarian and other minority languages. The analysis utilizes Richard Ruíz’s “orientations in language planning” framework (1984), expanded by Hult and Hornberger (2016). The results indicate that while Hungarian-Americans have mostly been trying to maintain their first language (in private domains), they have been critical of mostly Hispanic Americans for their explicit and repeated demands for taxpayer-funded minority-language accommodations, which were seen by many Hungarian-Americans as evidence of disloyalty and even ethnic separatism.

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