Sprechen wie die Ungarn

This dissertation focuses on Hungarian-Romanian language contact in
Northwest Romania. In the bilingual region of Crişana, a major
ethnographic change has occurred since 1920. This has resulted in
Hungarians becoming the minority. Migration of ethnic Romanians
from the countryside into the cities caused a significant
sociolinguistic split between modern urban and traditional rural
populations. There has been no sociolinguistic study of the
Romanian language in this region up to now. Prior dialect research
in the 1960s and 1970s limited itself to contact-induced language
change. It contains conflicting views of a number of features of
the old, rural Crişana subdialect: mid-open vowels, quantity
variation of all vowels, and palatal stops and nasals. Since these
features appear in Hungarian too, some scholars consider them to be
loans from the contact language, while others do not. An analysis
of folk-linguistic beliefs may help explain these inconsistencies.
Prior research has not considered this metalinguistic view of the
speakers. This dissertation fills this gap. It starts
methodologically from a model developed by Krefeld and Pustka
(2010), that speakers’ knowledge is manifested both in discourse
about language and in actual behavior. A survey was carried out,
comprising thirty six hour of interviews with a sample of local
people of all linguistic backgrounds and ages. The goal was to
collect spontaneous folk linguistic discourse (a method suggested
by Niedzielski/Preston 2000). In addition there was a questionnaire
with open-ended questions. The present dissertation shows
conclusively that phonetic borrowing is not the case but, on the
contrary, a folk belief about language. It is argued that the
Hungarian contact language effects as a negative model for the
development of an urban variety that draws from both the Romanian
standard and from eliminating similarities with Hungarian. Another
major contribution of the dissertation is a taxonomy of speakers
which goes beyond the established dichotomy of „Hungarians” vs.
„Romanians”. A distinction between practicing bilinguals
(„communicators”) and practicing monolinguals („segregators”) turns
out to be more convincing. In the field of variational linguistics,
the results of this study imply that consideration of folk beliefs
can be an important factor for determining the value of older
research. Furthermore, in this study it proved to be indispensable
for establishing a taxonomy of speakers to take into account not
only their linguistic competence but their actual performance.