Magyar nyelvi tájkép, különös tekintettel az Appalache-régió amerikai magyar sírfeliratainak nyelvhasználatára = Hungarian linguistic landscape, with special attention to the language use of American Hungarian gravestone inscriptions in Appalachia

Fenyvesi, Anna (2026) Magyar nyelvi tájkép, különös tekintettel az Appalache-régió amerikai magyar sírfeliratainak nyelvhasználatára = Hungarian linguistic landscape, with special attention to the language use of American Hungarian gravestone inscriptions in Appalachia. ALKALMAZOTT NYELVTUDOMÁNY, 2026 (KSZ). pp. 108-120. ISSN 1587-1061

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Abstract

Linguistic landscape research examines publicly visible written language use, analyzing the everexpanding range of inscriptions. After a brief introduction to the study of Hungarian American language use – a research trend begun in the 1980s by Hungarian sociolinguist Miklós Kontra in South Bend, Indiana, and later continued by Csilla Bartha in Detroit, Michigan, and the author of the present paper in McKeesport, Pennsylvania – the article provides an overview of the development of the trend of the study of linguistic landscape since its inception in the late 1990s, mentioning the main milestones of this development both in the international sociolinguistics literature and then, starting in the early 2010s. After the overview, the study reported on focuses on a relatively new area of linguistic landscape research, cemeteries, pursued only since 2022. Cemeteries are important sites for the formation of public memory, presenting linguistic data for the study of historical linguistic landscape as well. The paper discusses the linguistic landscape of 25 American Hungarian cemeteries in the Appalachian region where Hungarian immigrants lived (and died) beginning with the late 19th century, in the coaltowns of western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, western Ohio, and southwestern Pennsylvania and the industrial towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The paper analyzes grave inscriptions from 25 Hungarian American cemeteries of the Appalachian region, collected by the author in 2024. A corpus of more than 3,500 photographs of the graves of American Hungarians who lived in the 20th century provides insight into the changing linguistic landscape of the lives and language use of Hungarian immigrants and their descendants. Based on these, it can be concluded that (i) until World War II, the language of American Hungarian gravestone inscriptions was almost exclusively Hungarian, and the inscriptions were detailed and unique, often containing individualized messages. In contrast, (ii) from the 1940s onwards, the language of the inscriptions became predominantly English, with the use of Hungarian becoming largely symbolic, and the inscriptions became short and followed a similar format on every grave (often presenting essentially languageless units including only the name and dates of the person buried underneath. In both periods, (iii) the use of both languages in the same gravestone, as examples of code-switching, was quite rare. The results are novel not only in terms of American Hungarian cemeteries, but also in terms of Hungarian cemeteries located in areas inhabited by Hungarian minorities, documenting the linguistic heritage of bilingual Hungarians in a novel fashion.

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